Mason: So what’s the point?
Dad: Of what?
Mason: I don’t know, any of this. Everything.
Dad: Everything? What’s the point? I mean, I sure as shit don’t know. Neither does anybody else, okay? We’re all just winging it, you know? The good news is you’re feeling stuff. And you’ve got to hold on to that.
The feeling elicited by watching Boyhood is similar, though not quite as powerful, as the feeling imparted by the magisterial Up Series, a monumental project in documentary film in which director Michael Apted took a group of English schoolchildren and filmed interviews with them every seven years from the time they were seven years old up until the present day. The first of these documentaries was titled Seven Up (1964); the most recent documentary in the series was filmed when they were all 56 years old: 56 Up (2012).
When we watch Boyhood or the Up series, we sense how quickly time moves, and when we think about the passage of time and the swift, inexorable path along which our lives progress, we inevitably ask, “what’s it all about?” If we’re here for such a short time, and the time we do have flies by, and is lost forever once it’s gone—then what’s the point? Why do I exist? Why do we exist? Does life have a purpose?
But beyond these questions, what is that funny feeling we feel when watching Boyhood or the Up series? It is a certainly a sentimental, melancholic feeling, particularly for parents who have experienced the roiling emotions of sending a child off to college. It is a feeling of mono no aware, a Japanese term I learned about from Roger Ebert, which means the appreciation for, and heightened awareness of, the ephemera of time. It is also, surprisingly—and significantly—a religious feeling.
Religious Feelings
There is something about observing a compression of time, or experiencing the swift passage of time, that engenders those mysterious sensations that we term “religious” (or “numinous”) feelings—those sensations we receive that connect us to something that is greater than ourselves; those awe-some feelings of transcendence that sound the simultaneously melodious and awe-full sonnets of the supernatural and the spiritual within us; and those mystic chords of memory that move us to communion with others in our community who live in other regions of the globe and in other times of history.
This is what little Hans Castorp felt when, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, his grandfather would show him the family christening basin:
On the back, engraved in a variety of scripts, were the names of its successive owners, seven in number, each with the date when it had passed into his hands. The old man named each one to his grandson, pointing with beringed index finger. There was Hans Castorp’s father’s name, there was Grandfather’s own, there was Great-grandfathers’ (“Urgroßvater”); then the “great” (“Ur”) came doubled, tripled, quadrupled, from the old man’s mouth, whilst the little lad listened, his head on one side, the eyes full of thought, yet fixed and dreamy too, the childish lips parted, half with awe, half sleepily. That great-great-great-great (“Ur-Ur-Ur-Ur”)—what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past! . . . Religious feeling mingled in his mind with thoughts of death and a sense of history, as he listened to the somber syllable; he received therefrom an ineffable gratification—indeed, it may have been for the sake of hearing the sound that he so often begged to see the christening basin.[2]
The little one looked up at Grandfather’s narrow grey head, bending over the basin as it had in the time he described. A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity—these were sensations he had felt before on the like occasion, and both expected and longed for again, whenever the heirloom was displayed.
These, then, are the feelings we feel when we see Boyhood and the Up series: the “falling away of time,” the “piously cherished link between the present, [our] own [lives], and the depth of the past”—these are “religious” feelings, and they are feelings that, somehow simultaneously, we both long for and dread, yet long for again and again. These are the feelings that are behind the remarkable resonance of Boyhood.
Notes
1.
Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Penguin, 1961), 38.
2.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (trans. John E. Woods; New York: Knopf, 1995), 21.
Chapter 6
Exodus: Gods & Kings
What Does God’s Voice Really Sound Like?
With its controversial decision concerning the Voice of God, the movie Exodus: Gods & Kings demonstrates the fact that we cannot state any claims about the nature of God as a matter of fact. We can, however, make truth-claims about what we believe to be the nature of God—and within these truth-claims, we should allow for greater, not lesser, diversity of beliefs, for the Bible itself showcases God—and the voice of God—in many different tones.
Ever since Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston’s heavily modified voice as the voice of God in his Ten Commandments (1956), we have become so accustomed to thinking that the voice of God is supposed to sound like a deep male voice that the phrase “the voice of God” itself has become a synonym for “deep male voice.”
But the voice of God has not always been imagined as having sounded like “the voice of God.” The voice of God has at times been imagined as sounding like your parent’s voice (which could either be benign, benevolent, or terrifying, depending upon what kind of relationship you’ve had with your parents); at times, God’s voice has been imagined as a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12); and at other times, God’s voice—when actually heard by the prophet Samuel—was so ordinary-sounding that when God called out to Samuel (1 Samuel 3), Samuel thought it was his teacher Eli. It took God four—four!—calls to Samuel to get the young nonplussed prophet’s attention that it was actually God on the line, so to speak. (Thus proving that it was God—not Verizon or T-Mobile—who invented Caller ID.)
This is why Ridley Scott’s decision to cast an 11-year-old boy (Isaac Andrews, a British actor) as the voice of God in the 3D extravaganza Exodus: Gods and Kings, which opened this week, is not only innovative and refreshing, but is in fact restorative and startlingly traditional. The Bible more often portrays God’s voice as sounding ordinary and meek (or “still” and “small,” as God tells the prophet Elijah what His voice sounds like) than booming and thunderous. The critics who are deriding Scott’s decision as heretical, blasphemous, or somehow unfaithful to Scripture, seem to be overlooking Scripture’s actual descriptions of God’s voice.
To claim that we know anything about God as a matter of factual certainty, let alone that we know something as specific as how God’s voice sounds, is a fallacy. Theology is not an empirical discipline; we cannot know anything of the nature of God in the same way in which we can know the nature of Saturn’s rings. The latter, unlike the former, is discoverable through astronomic explorations, scientific investigations, and empirical observations. Theology is closer to an art than a science; just as something is “true” in art if it resonates with something deep within us, or is reflective of our emotional intuition of the way in which we experience the world, so too, a theological claim is “true” if it harmonizes with our emotions, is reflective of our lives, or offers us a meaningful narrative for our existence. As the prophet Isaiah—or as biblical scholars would have it, Second Isaiah—himself declared about God,