Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Also by Daniel Ross Goodman
Novels
A Single Life
Edited Books
Black Fire on White Fire: Essays in Honor of Rabbi Avi Weiss
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Wonder and Religion
in American Cinema
Daniel Ross Goodman
Hamilton Books
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • London
Published by Hamilton Books
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Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be produced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems,without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging Data Available
ISBN 978-0-7618-7223-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-7618-7224-5 (electronic)
לע״נ
In Loving Memory of Rabbi Neil Gillman
הרב נחום בן יצחק הכהן ורבקה גילמן
“We discover God. We invent the metaphors.”
For
Daniel Epstein, Seth Herstic, and Jonathan Leener
MAIORUM NUGAE NEGOTIA VOCANTUR, PUERORUM AUTEM TALIA CUM SINT, PUNIUNTUR A MAIORIBUS.
The idling of our elders is called business, the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders . . .
—Augustine, Confessions
Foreword
Movies can provide escapist entertainment that dumbs down the mind and passes the time into oblivion. They can also connect us to the transcendent, fill our lives with existential meaning or lead us to search for the depths of being. In this book, Daniel Goodman opens our eyes to the spiritual feast available for the taking in films.
Under cover of reviewing movies, Goodman leads us on a journey to meaning and inspiration. For the religious searcher, he breaks us out of the narrow box of canonical literature and leads us to browse in the enchanted forest of movies. For the spiritually inert, he awakens us to go beneath the surface of life and allows films to enable us to see the world with new eyes.
This is a serious book but it is fun to read. On page after page, it surprises us with new insights drawn out of old iconic screen moments. After reading Goodman, you will reverse the old adage. Instead of saying “I lost it at the movies,” you will say: “I found it (vision/divinity/global connectivity) at the movies.” Thank God and thank Goodman.
Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg
Riverdale, NY
January 2020
Permissions
The following chapters in this volume have been reprinted with the permission of the publications in which they originally appeared:
Chapters 1 (“To the Wonder”), 12 (“All is Lost”), 19 (“Blue Jasmine”), 20 (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), 21 (“Museum Hours”), and 22 (“Life Itself”): Journal of Religion & Film
Chapter 25 (“The Revenant”): Wall Street Journal
Chapters 2 (“Renoir”), 3 (“The End of the Tour”), 4 (“Nebraska”), 5 (“Boyhood”), 6 (“Exodus: Gods and Kings”), 7 (“Ex Machina”), and 8 (“Adaptation”): Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/
Chapters 13 (“Roger Ebert—In Memorium”) and 15 (“The Great Beauty”): Bright Lights Film Journal
Chapter 14 (“Hollywood, the Oscars, and the Missing Modern Jew): Haaretz
Chapters 16 (“Grand Budapest Hotel”), 17 (“The Big Short”), and 18 (“La La Land”): Kamera.Co.Uk Film Salon
Chapter 24 (“Tree of Life”): The Jewish Advocate
Chapter 23 (“The Great Gatsby”): Harvard Divinity Bulletin
Introduction
Why do we watch movies? If we read in search of more life, as Harold Bloom is fond of saying, then we watch movies, I believe, in search of wonder. We watch movies in search of awe-inspiring visions, transformative experiences, and moments of emotional transcendence and spiritual sublimity. In short, we watch movies for many of the same reasons that we engage in religion: to fill our ordinary evenings and weekends with something of the extraordinary; to connect our isolated, individual selves to something that is greater than ourselves; and because we yearn for something that is ineffable but absolutely indispensable.
This book is guided by the belief that the cinephiliac and spiritual impulses sprout from the same seed. Though they may be watered by different fountains, the desire we have to watch movies, and the need we feel to link our lives to the destiny of a historical faith community, stems from an ever-abiding if unstated sentiment that our basic material lives are not enough, that we need something more—movies and the cinema, spirituality and religion—to add an element to our lives that may not be necessary for our physical survival and yet is something we as human beings have always regarded as absolutely necessary for the survival of our souls: the encounter with wonder.
This book, through an exploration of some of the most intriguing films of the past two decades, illustrates how movies are, have been, and always will be partners with religion in inspiring, conveying, and helping us experience what Abraham Joshua Heschel refers to as “radical amazement”: the sense that our material universe and our ordinary lives are filled with more wonders than we can ever imagine, if only we know how to look at our world, and at our own lives, with spiritually—and, I would add, cinematically—trained eyes. Religion and film teach us how to look; they open up new vistas, and make the old ones new again. They illuminate the dark places, and drive away soul-stunting doldrums. They show us how humanity is touched by the heavenly, and how even the humblest human being is worthy of our eternal love and infinite concern. This book subscribes wholeheartedly to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s belief about the power of film, as articulated in his autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987): “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”
It is my hope that readers of this book will not only gain a greater understanding of how film directors use religious themes and theological motifs