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Date:         Tue, 13 Oct 1992 08:13:19 -0500
From:         FAC_JCLARK@JMUVAX.BITNET
Subject:      THE RAPTURE commentary: a protracted spoiler...

I wasn't a member of Cinema-L when THE RAPTURE was first released and
discussed, and in any event didn't lay eyes on it till barely a month ago.
Since then, I've viewed it another three times, once in the company of
friends and colleagues of the Christian faith, and have located a number
of the reviews and essays published on it, including one by the film's own
author.  I cannot recall a film at once more astonishing and troubling.
It inevitably generates an experience that's both esthetic and personal.
And it's a provocation to thought on its subjects--religion, spirituality
and morality--rather than a systematic statement that ends in definition.
So we are bound to have, even more than usually, differing opinions on its
meaning and its realization as art.

The following commentary addresses my own response to the film.  I haven't
been exhaustive here, but I mean to raise what I feel are its salient
features and issues.  This piece is actually a sprawling elaboration of a
pseudo-review I wrote on it for the friends with whom I viewed it on the
second occasion.  I often do little pieces like that prior to holding
monthly screenings of films that I champion for one reason or another.
(Remember me?  I'm the guy with the laserdisc addiction, the projection TV
and the surround sound system.)  This time, however, the film provoked
discussion of its subject to an extent none other had, as well as a
compulsion on my part to confront its impact by testing my thoughts and
views against others', to sort and refine them so as better to comprehend
them.  So here's a statement, however provisional.  In a sense as unironic
as THE RAPTURE itself is, you might say the compulsion to make and
communicate it is an act of bearing witness to a remarkable film.

Read on if you've already seen it and are so inclined.  If not, take heed:
after the next set of asterisks, you've entered the land of the SPOILER.
But viewers be warned, too, that like the film itself I may offer my own
provocations or offense, and even make observations that seem cryptic
because they open subjects not pursued further here.  There's no way to
proceed without such pitfalls, and enlarged as it is, this isn't a
finished essay.  For those who've viewed THE RAPTURE with love or
loathing, or at least some intrigue, and wish to proceed, my expectation
is not to reopen a discussion you may already have had and tired of, but
that the following may prompt you to revisit the film and better define,
if not reconsider, the nature of your own reactions.

***

THE RAPTURE has received a widely mixed reception, with the deepest
downside perhaps holding a surprise.  Michael Tolkin, the film's
author--and I use that term because he's both its writer and director, the
primary limitation of whose vision appear to have been budgetary and his
own talent--has confessed that the most virulent attacks on the film have
come from "liberal atheists."  Below I'll address some of the positions
that have been taken on the film or certain aspects of it, in the process
of developing my perceptions.

"At the outset"--  I'm about to begin the next paragraph with that phrase,
but a sense in which it doesn't apply needs to be pointed out first.  This
commentary deals with the film largely seen and felt in retrospect.  The
more tentative experience we form along with the film's unfolding is
touched on sometimes, but it cannot be addressed in detail here.  Where we
all start out is an elusive and personal thing; where we all end up is
marked by at least some signposts in common.  Interpretation of them then
becomes the catch.  So...

At the outset, what seems abundantly clear about the film to most of its
viewers is the status of its events.  They are meant to be taken
literally--right up to and including the Apocalypse.  We don't really
require a statement by filmmaker Tolkin (who made it nonetheless) that one
of the basic assumptions he began the film with is that God exists--now
what follows?  Even his special visual effects, as threadbare as they
sometimes appear (save the brilliantly evocative and economical jail
scene), tend to support his intentions: filmmakers that court the
figurative rather than literal, don't make such images so matter of
factly--it's in the nature of a cinematic tradition.  However, I've seen
one review that does suggest, without coming out and taking a clear
position, that what occurs to Sharon, the protagonist, is a delusional
experience grounded in her descent into psychosis.  This is clearly a
strained interpretation if based on what's present in the film alone.
Stylistically, Tolkin uses no cinematic devices to signal, however subtly,
a switch to a wholly subjective state of mind.  The only alternative would
be to take the entire film, from its start, as the depiction of a deeply
troubled woman in the process of breaking down, perhaps as she observes
herself at some disembodied remove.  This really amounts only a general
approach to the film, no more preferable than approaching it at literal
face value.  The tendency to want to see the film's issues in this
way--from an empirical, psychologically-oriented framework--reflects a
traditional artistic bias.  Such is deemed a worthwhile approach to issues
of human life; baldfaced spiritual experience presented as literal, like
some minor fantasy, is not.  But once you've accepted the former approach,
what are you left with?  The "its all in the mind" gambit, and isn't the
human mind a fascinatingly complicated thing to muse on?  Except that the
gambit has been played countless times, and the case of this film would
constitute a lesser example of it, since Tolkin actually witholds so much
realistic detail about Sharon's life that would psychologically enrich an
analytical portrait.

This isn't to say, though, that their isn't an element of Sharon's final
behavior that can be considered by usual empirical and social values as
psychotic.  She "sacrifices" her own child, claiming that God let her,
though Tolkin is careful not to portray any direct Abraham-and-Isaac link
with this event.  I say "careful" because earlier in the film, Tolkin
provides visual signals that are clearly indicative, if sometimes of
arguable imaginativeness, of spiritual events in Sharon's life.  When she
first sees the light, alone and intoxicated and desparate in her motel
room, the light literally sees her by lightening her face, and the
peaceful aftermath is dissolved to through the solitary image of the
Pearl.  When she later has her sign calling her to the desert, it's a set
of photographs in which her late husband Randy inexplicably appears,
beckoning from beyond the figures of strangers who have snapped themselves
into mementos of their own more mundane experience.  This sequence is, in
fact, imaginatively suggestive in its handling.  Consider:  Sharon
descends an outside staircase (from her apartment building? a mini-mall?),
preoccupied.  She looks up and sees part of some assemblyline machinery
for mass-processing photos.  Exactly what, we don't know, because Tolkin
only shows the machinery in closeup--not its context.  Through a window,
or what?  It's just disembodied, a center of attention that's the whole of
the moment.  It's also a potentially allusive detail to have Sharon
descending a staircase.  The young prophet of her congregation warns that
since only she has received a sign it could be a snare of Satan, so the
descent is appropriate on that count.  And it could also prefigure, in a
less literal way, the spiritual descent she is embarking on in the wake of
Randy's death. As I say, though, these are suggestions only, gracenotes
for interpretation.  As such they may cause a viewer to hesitate over the
origin of the experience involved with them--in a universe, remember,
where God does exist--but Sharon's experience here is clearly defined on a
level at which the decision to kill her daughter is not.

In effect, I've suggested in the last two paragraphs that Tolkin's
deployment of supernatural and natural details--in the latter case, namely
the particulars of Sharon's life--can be strategically ambiguous.  We know
what Sharon does for a living and the primary diversion she engages in to
fill up her life outside.  When she religiously converts, it's apparent
she's left these things, but outside of her faith--its profession
one-on-one, to her daughter, to her good friend; its practice within the
sect and church she's joined--what do we know?  Husband Randy now has an
executive job, they have a life together that seems better than materially
comfortable, and both have a demeanor that would hardly make it probable
they'd manipulate people uncaringly in the way they might have in their
former lives, with the philosophy once expressed by Randy: the world is
screwed up, and we have no power to make it better, so act accordingly for
self-benefit.  But what else do they do?  Are Sharon and family engaged in
good works outside of homemaking and church?  Or does their brand of
Christian belief lean toward the doctrine of election, in which only being
chosen (here evidenced by their finding and holding faith in Christ and
God?) matters, not how life is lived?  Or some state between the two?

For that matter, Tolkin's construction of his religious universe, once
he's assumed God and His judgement, is idiosyncratic in a way that thwarts
full identification with a blueprint for fundamentalist Christianity or
any variety.  The rapture, the judgment and heaven all exist, but police
officer Foster Madison--who has never been "saved"--may enter there.  The
eternal state of isolation to which Sharon is resigned echoes perhaps some
of the Biblical and otherwise doctrinal aspects of hell, but not even
those neatly; it's more like some eternal limbo.  In worldly terms, when
Sharon remains in the desert for weeks, why would not her church or her
worried friend pursue her from concern?

Issues such as these have prompted charges that Tolkin is being ambiguous
in an intential or sloppy way that equates with shallow cleverness or
incompetence, on both psychological and theological points.  But I think
instead that he has constructed, for the most part skillfully, a story to
raise spiritual questions that neither he nor anyone else can answer
conclusively--a story somewhat like a parable, the closest artistic form I
can think of.  Not a parable in the sense of a story leaning toward
allegory, with clear analogs to living situations, characters embodying
ideas and a firm single meaning as outcome.  But parable-like in terms of
an illustrative story depending more on metaphor, lacking specific detail
so as to distill the narrative to its essential issues and prompt the
viewer to fill in details from his or her own experience.  In doing so,
the viewer is engaged intellectually, emotionally, and morally.
One instance in which his film is unfruitful, however, is for those who
can take no personal interest in spiritual and religious issues at all,
finding them only a sort of epiphenomenon of an animal whose brain (as
Randy suggests) has grown too big and complicated for its basic needs,
food and sex.  So it gets itself screwed up in mere delusions.  For such
viewers, this film would seem to be like SF that doesn't deal with an
extrapolation of substance such as pollution or overpopulation, no matter
how fancifully, but with the premise that pigs can fly.  It's beneath
consideration.

This attitude might be taken generously as a manifestation of a literary
issue often referred to as the problem of belief.  Traditionally, the
position on this issue has been that for literary art to work
esthetically, one has to accept its philosophical, religious or other
premises.  Otherwise, thank you no, it's not to my taste.  20th century
schools of criticism have challenged this position, contending that a work
can speak its own internally generated truth and be experienced largely
independent of outside systems of reference.  I can't manage to define
here the relation between the problem of belief and this film.  But I do
believe that its attempt to dodge a fully developed system of belief in
exploring its subjects is both deliberate and artful, and does result in a
film that can touch a wide variety of viewers.

How else would one begin to expect the response from many viewers whom
Tolkin has called liberal atheists--one of virulent hostility?

Recently, after my third viewing of this film, I reread C.S. Lewis' "The
Problem of Pain," one of his layman's Christian apologetics.  Lewis had
long been one of the favorite writers of my younger years, for the
elegance of his writing and the clarity and penetration of his thinking.
It's been a very long time to this sudden return.  Early in his slim
volume Lewis deals persuasively with two distinct human experiences--the
numinous and the moral. The numinous is the aweful sense of supernatural
presence(s) in the world.  The moral is a compulsive sense of "ought" and
"ought not" in relation to ones actions.  As Lewis points out, both
experiences are in a way a "jump" for humankind, since they cannot be
logically deduced to have developed from our environment.  Nor are they
necessarily connected--not now, nor even always connected in the earlier
reaches of human history. But eventually they did connect, for many people
or peoples. And this connection Lewis finds a "jump," too.  It's best to
let him speak here:  "What can be more natural than for a savage haunted
at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which awes him is also
the authority which condemns his guilt?  And it is, indeed, natural to
humanity.  But it is not in the least obvious.  The actual behaviour of
that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no resemblance to the
behaviour which morality demands of us.  The one seems wasteful, ruthless,
and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities.  Nor can the
identification of the two be explained as a wish-fulfilment, for it
fulfils no one's wishes.  We desire nothing less than to see that Law
whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable
claims of the Numinous.  Of all the jumps that humanity takes in its
religious history this is certainly the most surprising."   If one is
inclined to accept Lewis' reasoning as persuasive, it' still a stretch to
accepting Christianity as the best possible outcome of this conjoined
experience.  If one does not accept the conjunction of the two, or even
accept the numinous experience itself, the argument one adopts instead is
Randy's blunt pronoucement or, as Lewis himself states it, that the
numinous (and perhaps even the moral) arise from "a mere twist in the
human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological
function."

How do Lewis' observations relate to THE RAPTURE?

Once again, in his film Tolkin has staked his ground by making a definite
connection with the numinous.  God exists.  This admits the possibility of
his creatures experiencing him, though the filmmaker provides us some
leeway in determining if and when this event occurs in the film.  Further,
at least on first viewing he provides us less basis for confidence in our
decision until the film is concluded, because, like a good epiphany, his
film withholds its numinous revelation until the climax.

On the other hand, Tolkin's film is more circumspect about the moral
experience.  It entertains the connection of moral and numinous, arguing
it both ways through its characters.  But apart from this, the film
fractures and troubles the connection for its audience.  On the verge of
heaven itself, two characters face a judgment predicated on a choice they
must make, and the subject of that choice is only this question: Do you
love God for giving you the gift of life?  None of God's creatures could
claim their experience of that "gift" as less than sorry much of the time.
But either it has purpose and justification beyond understanding, or it
seems not to--and if the latter, then God is the numinous that gave us
life, but is due no respect as the source for our morality.  How much more
troubling is the choice for us, viewers of a "mere film" who, unlike its
characters finally are, may be unsure there is or absolutely confident
there is not a God at the end of it all?

Add to this Tolkin's simple, brilliant strategy--sometimes mistaken for
dull incompetence--of withholding judgment on his characters' lives.  This
strategu runs from Sharon's "amoral" group sex exploits through the
beliefs of her evangelical contacts, and even to her final acts in the
desert and beyond.  It's not that Tolkin has no views; like all of us, he
could have what sometimes turns out to seem many often conflicting views
on the wilderness of issues his film has sown.  But it's for us to take
the opportunity to form views and meanings.  Tolkin's brilliant strategy
is to let us slip into whatever still lingering doubts we have in answer
to the question raised by several of his characters--if we weren't taught
it was wrong, would I still feel so bad?--then let us, in that state, view
or re-view the transactions of Sharon's story, devoid of any support but a
camera eye as unblinking, and unwinking, as God's might be.

The result is to isolate us, to an extent greater than with any other
strategy I can think of, before the central themes of religion,
spirituality and morality considered as more than everyday
psycho-sociological phenomena.  Which isn't to say the mundane is to be
ignored.  It can't be, because it's the part of our thoughts, feelings and
actions most evident to us every day--the ground zero experience from
which we may or may not "jump" to another.  But THE RAPTURE, by raising
spirituality as as a premise and not a corollary to this experience,
forces us to examine in a fresh way aspects of our lives that have become
perfunctory.  The attempt to try and avoid this examination and the
inevitable judgments that arise from it--whether avoidance due to sloppily
applied political correctness or not--results in a personal judgement by
default anyway.

Or almost anyway.  The one way out is, again, to reject the film as
pointless and meaningless.  But this is really an extreme reaction, one
that denies that the film has any moral ground (once the numinous premise
has been dismissed) of interest to any sensitive and intelligent viewer.
In my reading, it clearly does, and I'll continue the argument.  But
perhaps these observations on strategy are enough to begin illuminating
the hostile reactions to the film.  It's clearly meant to change your
life, though it knows not how.

Before leaving strategy, however, it's important to acknowledge Mimi
Rogers' performance as Sharon.  She's the lynchpin that drives the
strategy by keeping the viewer bound to the center of the film's issues.
We may not have a perfectly explicable, singular understanding of every
action and emotion she shows (again, those lacunae in the parabolic
story...), but her performance is the true and living center of the film,
providing its breath from moment to moment.  With Tolkin's guidance,
Rogers/Sharon's spiritual peace and joy are never a glassy-eyed
caricature; and her spiritual torment (unlike her sense of her own lost
soul in the desert) never loses perfect focus in the burning-glass of her
face.  We may not be able to make complete sense of her at every emotional
turn, but her implacable presence on the screen compels us to confront
Sharon and whatever message flows through this telephone operator.

As Joe Louis said in a simpler context, you can run but you can't hide. So
I'm brought to the same point as Tolkin, whenever he conducts group
discussions in the wake of THE RAPTURE.  The questions come: What does it
mean? and What do you believe?

Tolkin has avoided any full or final statements on the meaning of his
film.  Perhaps he cannot make them, and in any event he needn't be
considered the arbiter of his own work, which after all seems made to
question.  We can note that he's apparently in sympathy with the need for
spirituality and moral direction, though he doesn't subscribe to Christian
fundamentalist beliefs.  Beyond that, he admits to confusion rather than
comprehension, and that he wanted to provoke the viewer to examine his or
her own beliefs, confused or not.

What I see in THE RAPTURE is a compound of what it seems to reveal from
the details of its art, and my personal experience, learning, insights and
values--in short, the same unique life that any viewer must bring to bear.
Some of these personal things are implicitly brought to bear in any
discussion or argument a viewer may raise about such a film.  But some
seem better to confess, to incorporate more directly in individual
interpretation.

Myself, I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, but raised in a
Protestant denomination at least through confirmation, by parents who were
indifferent themselves to religious practice.  For me as a child, either
church was God enough in the right sense.  But as I grew older and became
self-responsible rather than dutiful or obligated in social activities, I
simply drifted slowly away in keeping with an independent, often solitary
mind and spirit.  The drift did acheive an equilibrium, and here I am,
decades later, in that middle state of agnostic.  I cannot find it in
myself to accept the Numinous... at least in the traditional forms offered
me by the culture I know.  C.S. Lewis came as close as any one or thing to
returning me there.

Sharon, now shorn of lover and alone in her stripped, clean bed.  When she
implodes the silence with her plaintive whisper, "God, please help me...
God, I'm lost," my heart rends a little.  She pierces it even now --two,
three, four viewings later--when I know all too well and too terribly who
she is and where she is going.  But my heart, and perhaps my head, cannot
be dishonest enough to respond in kind.  At various moments in life I've
considered assisting religiously founded purposes or agencies, but could
not bridge the gap, even if no one knew or cared for my beliefs but
myself.  This, despite a moral sense that grows more complex and insistent
in middle age, and wants not to be connected to nothing more than an act
of will alone.  "There has to be something more," she whimpers to Randy
before letting him go.

Sharon's something more is God, and Tolkin does his best to reveal Him
through her, his other believers, and his escalation of events to the
supernatural empirical.  Neither his God nor his camera eye offers
judgments, but being possessed of personal histories and the need to make
meaning, we do and we must.

It hardly takes more than reflex for most of us to find Sharon's job as a
phone operator--a sussurruss of monotones rising from cubbyhole
workstations--to be lifeless drudgery, the molding of a person into a
human node buried among messages and connections made more important than
itself.  And Sharon's extracurricular life of casual, almost impersonal
group sex is hardly less empty.  We have the growing listlessness of her
responses as cues.  But there's also the way Tolkin has staged her
encounters, like soft-core porn distracted by a higher purpose: couples
and triples copulating almost absently, sometimes only decor in the frame,
sometimes while apposite conversation occurs.  The disjunction among mind,
body and emotions could hardly be more apparent.  But is it a spiritual
lack that's manifested here, one might ask, or is it Randy's
animal-with-a-brain-too-big?

Answers of a sort start to come.  Sharon, foundering in a slough of
despond without an answer to her "help me"--a dangerous hitchhiker, liquor
and his gun to her head through her own hand--literally sees the light,
sees the Pearl of apocalyptic dream.  Tolkin fleshes them out as bluntly
as he can.  Sharon rises on a high, regains Randy to conversion, and six
years pass in the age of the end-time fortold by the boy prophet.  Randy's
violent death occurs, then Sharon's final vision and, despite her
conviction, she ends by losing her way and losing her God--rejecting not
an idea of Him but the actuality.

How is a viewer--any viewer, this viewer--to take it all?

First, there's the down side that I've already suggested.  At bottom from
the unbelieving and unsympathetic, total rejection and even hostility.
From the unbelieving but perhaps sympathetic, the psychotic delusion
reading, with its corollary "this is the consequence of cult religion."  I
don't find the latter persuasive, however: Tolkin is very careful about
portraying his fundamentalists/evangelists, and other than the dream and
the boy, there's little oddness to pin on them.  I rather take these
details as a vehicle for heightening and distilling the film's spiritual
issues in dramatic terms.  And as I suggested in my introductory remarks,
this a film without real irony: if you snort--in discomfort, embarrassment
or condescension--at Sharon telling Vic "He's the Lord Jesus Christ, Vic,
he's the Son of God," or at Sharon fretting over the clothes she'll wear
to her desert appointment with God, it's an ironic snort of your own
making.  The impassive unwinking face of this film offers none.

Then we have the various positions born of various faiths or denominations
with a faith, each with guiding dogma.  I'm incapable of pursuing what
these positions might be, beyond noting that Tolkin claims his film
received mixed but often positive response among many religious viewers.
Many of them doubtless sought and couldn't find to complete satisfaction a
vindicating fit with their tenets of faith.  Not in Tolkin's dogmatically
mongel--almost empty?--parable.

Then one comes to positions such as mine, perhaps agnostic or even
atheistic, and humanist in one stripe or another.  One such viewer, in the
most interesting review I read, maintains that Sharon's religious
conversion proves to be as shallow as her past hedonism, and her creators
(both Tolkin and God) punish her for that.  I find some sense in this, but
recoil at the notion that both Tolkin and his God mean to express cruelty
here.

In my view, Sharon's faith collapses because it indeed is built on too
shallow a foundation.  Her whimper to Randy ("There has to be something
more") is followed by "I'm tired of the pain in my life...."  This is the
key.  The religious sect that she commits herself to is apocalyptic in
inclination, and facing the "problem of pain" in the life of the world is
a less arduous effort if an end seems in sight.  Sharon's effort can even
bear an abruptly slain loved one.  Reunion will be soon.  Whether her
vision of Randy (along with its interpretation) is her God testing her,
Satan tempting her, or a self-induced attempt to force His hand, cannot be
answered and remains part of the film's questions.  But it's subordinate
to the point that, through one agency or another, Sharon's faith collapses
and--both in control and out of control in the wrong ways ("What's control
got to do with it?" she asked Randy at the prospect of sexual
adventure)--she performs her sacrifice, unbidden except by her daughter.
It's as if a mother in a moment of forgivable weakness gives in to the
demand of a petulant child, or a terminally suffering one: a moment both
ludicrous and horribly painful with a complex truth.  In the process, her
conception of God the numinous, parts company with an outraged and
tormented moral sense.  At the end, she demands through the shade of her
daughter Mary--"Let me ask him"--how He could have created so much pain in
the world and yet still expect to be loved?  Receiving no answer but the
one she can and does make herself (despite "Don't ask God to meet you half
way"), she cannot accept His "gift of life."

C.S. Lewis answers "The Problem of Pain" as most any Christian would.
Pain is the reminder and refiner's fire for humankind, who are fallen, so
that we may achieve grace, and therefore it is part of God's compassionate
plan, no matter how badly things seem to be in life.  This is something
that Sharon, being who her life has made her and expecting what she does,
cannot see and bear without qualification.  Control must remain beyond the
self.  But what relevance, then, could THE RAPTURE have for an audience
like me, agnostic if not atheistic?

The key here is that secondary lynchpin of Tolkin's film, Foster Madison
the police officer, who befriends Sharon and Mary in the desert.  Besides
Mary, he is the only other person we can see going to heaven.  So it is
important to attend to how Tolkin has written him, and as important that
Will Patton--a wonderfully suggestive actor in a small, great
performance--has played him.

Foster, as one of my Christian friends pointed out, is very much the good
samaritan.  Certainly, he's one of the meek who here inherits more than
the earth alone.  But we needn't make sense of him this way if we're not
so inclined.  Foster displays kindness: he doesn't bluff Sharon into
leaving the desert altogether, he returns with candy and a blanket.  He's
polite and respectful: he doesn't pry too deeply into Sharon's beliefs and
actions.  And there's no escaping the sense that Foster is attracted to
Sharon--but isn't the man to pursue an advantage, is a man who know and
enacts "ought not."  It would have been easy for Tolkin to make this
figure a more stereotypically cop-like presence.  Instead he's a figure
pure and almost (allegorically?) unreal in his sensitive qualities.  Only
Patton's intense performance provides an oddly charming, naive edge to
these qualities.  With what seems self-deprecating regret, not just
politeness, he admits he's never been "saved."

But on the verge of heaven, at the sudden realization that both it and God
do indeed exist, he can say without hesitation: "yes," to the gift of
life.  And he passes over with a smile.

What to make of this?  Was he one of the elect and simply didn't know it
until the end--if you're so doctrinally inclined?  Was it perfectly
"reasonable" that, saved by Christ or no, he pass over because of his
character--if you're otherwise doctrinally liberal?  Or does this
conclusion merely show that what one finds in the end turns out to be what
one wishes for or expects (like some formulation of "Forbidden Planet"'s
id-machine)?  The clue here might be one other telling detail: Foster,
explaining his unsaved state, says playfully(?) that he's been taught in
the force not to give up his gun.  Authority is an important issue; facing
the highest there is, he may just be extending his accepting nature.  Or
is his figure and sentiment not so much a question of authority as the
moral force it embodies?  --As usual, provocative questions.

I see some sense in all these views, but muse elsewhere.  I recall,
because of its relevance to how I think and feel now, the differences in
cultural expression among "primitive" and "developed" societies or
civilizations.  As social organization becomes larger and more complex, it
multiplies its own specialized cultural expressions.  In simpler societies
untouched by our civilization, there's good evidence of the lack of
separation in practice among art, religion and daily life; sometimes even
the terms don't exist.  And even from a faulty and limited anthropological
view outside, one central perception emerges:  Religion, true religion, is
something that tends to shape one's life, not something one fits into the
life one's already leading.  There's a sense that this holds truer for the
lives of simpler societies, only the sense that it is something we have
been losing, though we may value it, in a more complex civilization.

Certainly Christian fundamentalism, among other religious practices, can
be attempts to regain this sense of religion for us.  So I can accept that
Tolkin's film shows (as well as some remarks he's made in print) at least
some sympathy with its stance.  But my observation on the nature of true
religion holds meaning beyond this for those of us who cannot commit to
the experience, institutionally or otherwise formally.

Because the notion that religion, in its spiritual dimension connected
with morality, is a force meant to shape one's life, really translates
generally into a vision or (to be less lofty) attitude toward life that
informs one's actions.  This is an accessible idea not only to the
traditionally religious but to anyone with moral values and standards.
And that includes--unlike the experience of the numinous--just about every
human population we know of throughout history (excepting their
sociopathic and psychopathic members).  It's a hard idea to face squarely,
because applied properly a moral vision or attitude would become nearly
one with the breath of our actions.  There would be no effort of conflict
in obeying "ought" and "ought not"--if we were perfect; but at least we
could manage less effort and lapse if we did not so compartmentalize and
provisionalize the attitude we aspire to.  If we had it in full
measure--not just those we label saints or oddball philanthropists of one
kind or another--we'd be able to make of Sharon's job a thing of purpose
and joy at least for those inclined or obliged to perform it.  Or, failing
that possibility, we'd have the courage, purpose and pleasure to transform
a society in which such labor had no place.  None of this necessarily
means becoming crusaders for good works or causes impacting a larger
public.  The influence of one's life begins in one's immediate sphere of
personal relations; and if everyone attended to that individually, how
could the larger social sphere not be affected?  What is all too common in
experience could be less so.  The social critic Paul Goodman once wrote
words to the effect that, in order to achieve "utopia," one must act as if
it already existed.  What else is this but, in other form for the
unbeliever fallen, Christ's claim that "The kingdom of God is within you"?
The problem, besides pain, is how to pass through intellectual will to
reach an attitude that can make such things real?  How to lose control in
the right way....

These are perceptions that even those without sense of and formal faith in
a numinous higher power can admit and confront.  They do it, inadvertently
and ironically enough, whenever they're upset with a film like THE
RAPTURE, since their reaction exhibits an underlying concern over any
thing or institution that can religiously influence.  They're upset in
part because they perceive the pain and strife that formal religion often
fosters, and are compelled to expose it on behalf of a more rational
defense of human decency and justice.  This is at least a humanist moral
ground.  And compelled to live by it, with whatever lapses, even those who
believe in no God and no judgment of His face, in the end, their own
estimation of their lives by their own values and the implicit judgment of
other lives that have been touched by theirs and must continue on in its
wake.

If you can accept this premise of religion in this moral, somewhat
metaphorical sense of action-shaping vision or attitude, look again at THE
RAPTURE's conclusion.

Foster Madison, the police officer who crosses to paradise as easily as
breathing the breath that carries his answer: we know by his actions that
he's a decent man in a handful of incidents with Sharon.  Even her arrest
is almost tenderly sad.  We know nothing concrete about what sort of man
he's been and the specific things he's done in the rest of his personal
history, but one would be hard pressed to think him comfortable with the
empty games of Sharon's preconversion life.  This is no judgment, however,
of that life as some albatross that can never be shucked.  There's no
reason to believe that Sharon's cellmate Angie, who once ran the same
circles but is now a fervent believer, does not wholly accept God and his
gift.  Surely, she's passed over as well.

And now Sharon.  She makes her choice not to accept God.  But what is
meant by "choice"?  Tolkin has suggested that Sharon's rational choice
indicates rejection of a God who created a dreadful universe and an
affirmation of her individual identity (rather than sublimation in
paradise).  Seeing similarly, many viewers of the film nonetheless
reportedly found it incredible that Sharon, out of personal pride, would
stubbornly make such a decision.  After all, this is eternity we're
talking about.

But both views smack of choice considered as a rational option on an
investment.  In Tolkin's view, Sharon is too principled to accept a good
investment because it's tainted; in the other view, she's too stupid to
accept and not question what after all she simply may not understand (and
even if she does, why look a gift horse...?).

I'd suggest a different course of interpretation here.  Sharon makes the
choice she does because, rational or not, she can make no other.  That
choice is born of who she has become in her life, just as Foster's is born
of who he is.  It isn't a stock-or-principle-option decision--not to a God
who (as Sharon pointed out to her friend Vic) knows everything about you.
Tolkin's view, expressed above, is by his admission tentative since his
feelings on his film's subject are confused, so there is no necessary
conflict here.  It's admittedly tricky to see in Sharon's final
actions--formulated by an author with these mixed feelings--clear signs of
my interpretation, but that's some of the consequence of parable as much
as authorial intention.  One can read, I think, from Sharon's final
conversation with Mary's shade, a sense of compulsion as much as an act of
will.  You might even hear in her final word spoken alone, tail
upturned--"forever...(?)"--a dawning comprehension of this.

In an essay largely about his film, Tolkin has mused (without clear
answer) whether THE RAPTURE is a film about spirituality or one that is
spiritual.  I believe the film to be both: overtly about spirituality
because that is its subject; and spiritual because of its effect on
viewers.  Whether that effect is a call to some action, a new affirmation
or clarification of beliefs already held, or a troubling self-examination
that gives pause and may in time reorient one--I'd be generous enough to
call that spiritual.  Many other fine films, like all art, touch the
thoughts and emotions with new questions and insights.  But I think this
film is direct and unabashed enough to touch a mainline nerve in one's
experience in a way that others do not.  In Ezra Pound's terms, THE
RAPTURE makes it new.  It means to convince us that the lives we lead do
matter, whether they are shaped by a moral God or some other governing
perception; and perhaps that there are differing paths to making them
worthy, none of them easy.  The question for some of us, like Sharon, may
be: what does God want of us?  But surely the question for others of us
must be: what do we want of ourselves?  And the gap between the question
and our answer, with our lives in motion between the two--a gap never as
small and easily bridged as Foster's heavenly passage--remains some part
of anyone having the least moral sense.  I'd wager that most of us think
of ourselves, moving, somewhere between the poles of Sharon and Foster.
The place to which the film leads us is very much like its final event: a
place where we're compelled to judge the parable of human existence it
portrays through our own lives, beliefs and values--and thus to judge them
as well.

In time this viewer may feel differently about some of the esthetic
choices Tolkin has made in constructing his unique and haunting film.
Details that seem skillful or compromised or emptily clever now, may
exchange places, increase or decrease in significance.  But it seems to me
they would only remain blemishes on what is a great film, graced with a
genius for quaking the ground-zero of our common experience.

Jeff Clark