Click here to view the embedded video.

Clarke has produced a few similar short films with Christianity Today, and he’ll be making more for the magazine’s ongoing project examining Christians at work in American cities.

Clarke has also made documentaries on his own, including last year’s feature-length film Wrestling for Jesus: The Tale of T-Money, a frank, somewhat disturbing journey into the heart of an evangelistic wrestling ministry based in South Carolina.

I asked Clarke to answer a few questions about his role as a journalist making films about religion and his approach to telling nonfiction stories. After the exchange, you’ll find other short docs from Clarke’s idiosyncratic collection.

*****

How would you describe yourself as a filmmaker? What are you trying to accomplish with your work?

On the most basic level, I’m trying to figure out how to tell a compelling story. How do I develop conflict without manufacturing it? (That would be reality television.)

Beyond that, however, I’m hoping the pieces I create do one of two things for people. The first is that they humanize the “other.” We live in a time when people who are different than us are easily caricatured and simplified through 140 character barbs that we lob from a distance. When you enter a person’s life either as a filmmaker or a viewer, many of the assumptions you have about the “other” begin to disappear, or at least get appropriately tempered.

Life in America would be a lot better if we regularly broke bread together around a dinner table and talked. Maybe in some way, my films give people that experience of a dinner table discussion with someone that the viewer would normally never have access to.

The other thing I hope to accomplish is to put a mirror up to the viewer and reflect back to them some sort of image that will cause them to ponder themselves. But what’s even more exciting to me is if that mirror can be like one of those ones that you find in a fun house that distorts your image. You see your reflection and know there’s something in it that resembles yourself. But it’s not how you picture yourself—something is off. You then have to do the work as a viewer of discerning what is genuine and what is distorted.

I guess what it comes down to is I want to make the viewer work a little.

How do you understand the balance between being an observer or investigator and being a storyteller?

As a documentary filmmaker, I am taking the immense complexities of life and relationships and boiling it down to something that is relatively simple and makes sense to a viewer in the space of three to eighty minutes. I like to think that the actual filming of a documentary is much more observational because I want to be open to all the possible directions a story could head. When I was younger and on location, I thought I knew ahead of time where a story might go. I’ve learned to resist that temptation and be open to what the moment will present. But once I’m editing, I’m thinking about developing characters and telling a story.

Perhaps in doing so, the final piece becomes as much a reflection of the filmmaker as the subject. So I try to ask myself if what we have captured reflects how I understand this person’s life.

What drew you to the “Wrestling for Jesus” project?

I’ll admit that when I first heard about what these guys were doing, I saw it as a curiosity. But when I met Timothy and some of the other wrestlers, I was taken by the community of men who gathered around this common mission of Wrestling for Jesus. As I began to hear their stories and see their lives, I saw how this mission in some way gave these men structure, discipline, and even hope. There was something universal in their attempt to try to pull themselves up by their collective bootstraps. Of course, in the end, it doesn’t work out the way Timothy imagined, but I can relate to that basic human desire.

What kinds of questions about religion are you trying to ask with your work?

Are the religious experiences of people real and authentic? And if they are authentic to that individual, does that immediately give them some sort of value or credibility (assuming that it doesn’t drive them to some sort of violence)? I’ve been around too many religious leader types to take things at face value. What appears to be a humble and loving leader ends up being selfish and arrogant when you peek behind the curtain. Likewise, I have seen how religious activity that I find puzzling and even concerning gives real value to people—especially those living with some degree of suffering.

What role do your personal religious commitments play in your work?

I believe that one of the most valuable things that each of us steward is our own personal story that we are in some ways writing throughout the course of our lives. This doesn’t mean that our lives have to be like a simplistic movie script (although I could use some Tom Cruise action sequences in my life), but rather, our experiences, thoughts, and actions weave together to form some narrative that hopefully reflects what we believe about life.

Therefore, if someone is going to trust me with their story that is of immense value, I better be really careful in how I treat it.

I guess that’s a way of saying that many of my religious commitments affect how I treat the people I film and collaborate with. That will probably ooze into the final product, but I am not asking the question, “How can Project X communicate this belief that I hold?”

You have created “corporate documentaries” for the likes of Christianity Today, but in some ways, the tone and scope of those films seems in keeping with your other work. Do you agree? How do you balance being a “documentarian for hire” with being a more traditional journalist-documentarian?

With activist non-profits at times, I feel like a “documentarian for hire”—I guess because I am. A lot of non-profits are in a little bit of a pickle. They want to use documentary to communicate their mission and vision; however, when given the choice between a messy and real story or the simplicity of their vision, they will almost always choose the nicely packaged vision statements. This is why a lot of non-profit video is filled with well-crafted statements and portraits of people looking longingly at the camera. I understand the appeal.

I’ve been fortunate with Christianity Today to be given a great deal of freedom. In fact, when I created a piece in collaboration with CT and another organization that told a balanced but raw story that the organization wanted to change it because it didn’t communicate its values, CT stood by what I created because it fit the journalist-documentarian mold that they value.

What projects are you working on now?

I am currently working on a series of short films with Christianity Today called “This Is Our City.” We are looking at how Christians are making “common-good decisions” for the flourishing of their city. We are spending time in six different cities; Portland, Richmond, Phoenix, Detroit, New York, and Palo Alto. I think it gives a very different picture of evangelicals than what [we hear in] our current political discourse.

More from Nathan Clarke:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By “best,” part of what I mean is that it is sticking with me. One of the most important tests a film has to pass in order to gain my sustained admiration is that it can’t let me go–it has to filter its way through my consciousness in the days and weeks after I’ve seen it. Plenty of films are pleasant but forgettable, but films that speak to me well after I’ve left the theater or turned off the TV/laptop/iPad? Much rarer.

I’ve been thinking about Beauty Is Embarrassing for the better part of a week. Beauty is a documentary about the artist Wayne White. You may not know the man, but you likely know his work–he’s the creative director behind much of the look and feel of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, in addition to the music videos for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” and the George Méliès-inspired Smashing Pumpkins video “Tonight Tonight.”

White hooked up with the Pee Wee team not long after college and experienced quick and heady success. But after the show ended and aside from sparse music video success, there wasn’t much work for White. Beauty Is Embarrassing is the story of an artist who hits a midlife wall, and whose work is so unique and strange that there’s really no place for it until, almost magically, a new place is created, one more abundant and lasting.

It’s also the story of a strange kind of rascal–one who parades himself at times as a misanthrope, but he’s clearly too full of love for true misanthropy, too full of life for true despair, even when he wants to rage against the world. White believes deeply in beauty, and if you think that’s cheesy, then White wants you to know you’re part of the problem.

White’s Pee Wee days were big on puppetry, and to this day, the man has a gift for kinetic art. But his most recent work, and the work for which he’ll likely be most remembered, is a series of paintings that involve placing bright, shiny 3-D lettering over mass-produced lithograph landscapes–the kind you can pick up by the half-dozen at your local Salvation Army. The words and phrases White places on the paintings are often crass and often gauntlet-throwing, and at first glance the works seem like mere novelties. But as you take them in, you find that they have an odd staying power, not unlike White himself.

Beauty Is Embarrassing is a celebration of White, and I won’t be surprised to see people critique it for embracing its subject overly much. But Beauty wants to be a love letter to an earthy saint, and director Neil Berkeley manages that aim admirably. The film mixes heavily cut, montage sequences with slowly developing sections where we watch, for instance, White travel back to his Tennessee home to help a local high school pull off a high-concept art project.

Throughout the film, we get to watch pieces of a stage production White presented at the Modern Art Museum at Fort Worth. That night, White told his life story against a backdrop of his paintings and puppetry, revealing in intimate detail how his work emerged from the ground of his personal history. The presentation gives the film its shape and scope and allows much of it to remain first-person. The result is a film that feels like the beginning of a relationship–one that will stay with you long after the final frame.

I’ll respect his wishes. The experience of the film depends on your not knowing anything about it—not because there is some big reveal, but because the film reveals itself to you steadily, act by act, and it’s tough to describe anything beyond what the title tells you (a group of students head to a cabin in the woods; frights ensue) without ruining something important.

Imagine, at a conceptual level, all six seasons Lost distilled into a feature film, and you’ll have some idea of why you don’t want to know much about Cabin before you see Cabin.

But I do want to make a comment that won’t spoil anything for anyone and that might set the table for a fruitful conversation once you’ve seen the film: The Cabin in the Woods is in keeping with the horror film tradition of depending on religion to deepen its sense of fright.

Many horror films draw on particular religions or particular faith practices, with Catholicism being the most represented due to the genre’s historical relationship to the gothic novel. Other horror films just draw on the fundamental human experiences of dread and the uncanny. Some use religion to make themselves more scary; some use religion to explain the source of our fears. The Cabin in the Woods does something more interesting—it uses both particular forms of religious faith and practice and an overall sense of dread to help ask questions about the meaning and purpose of the horror genre.

The philosopher Noel Carroll said that horror stories want to produce in us a combination of fear and disgust. Carroll calls this “art-horror” in order to distinguish it from the “natural horror” of, say, fear of a coming tornado. Art-horror describes our relationship to a story—we’re not just frightened by Frankenstein or Freddy Krueger; we’re repulsed by them, in part because they are deformed versions of ourselves. Horror can be very cheap, of course (which is part of Whedon and Goddard’s concern), but when it’s rich, it forces us to look at those deformities. Horror promises that it’s fun to be frightened, and then, once the fun is over, keeps us staring until we’re ready to ask what we’ve done to become this way.

The Cabin in the Woods, it seems to me after one viewing, is this rich kind of horror. Its use of religion is not the most pronounced aspect of the film, but it’s necessary to the film’s most basic question: Why would we go to The Cabin in the Woods in the first place?

As scholars like Robert Wuthnow and Alan Wolfe have documented, evangelicals are everywhere and they’re doing everything. They may sound like social outliers when you read about them in the newspaper, but evangelicals are hard to spot in the wild because they blend right in. They’re teaching your kids at the neighborhood school. They’re running your local sports grill or sweeping out the back. They’re working on TV shows and scoring films. And, as Storkel’s fascinating film reveals, when you’re in Las Vegas, they’re sitting right next to you at the blackjack table, taking the house’s money.

Holy Rollers charts the journey of young evangelical pastors and lay leaders who launched a card-counting business, dubbed the Church Team, and cleaned up to the tune of $3.2 million over 5 years. I talked to Storkel about his film and the questions it raises about evangelical belief and behavior.

How did you get access to the Church Team?

I have known one of the founders of the team, Colin, since we were kids. I think we met in 4th or 5th grade and we’ve kept in touch ever since. When he told me he was starting a career in card counting, it sounded a bit crazy. (He was waiting tables at the time.) As I heard more and more, I knew this was the perfect topic for a documentary.

The card counters in the film seem like they are able to baptize blackjack fairly easily, and they claim that playing cards can be a kind of Christian mission. In what way are these rollers holy?

First of all, I don’t think that that everyone on the team shared the same opinions. There were a lot of different people on the team with many differing beliefs. I don’t think anyone thought the act of playing cards or beating the casino was a holy act, although some of them may have made parallels to aspects of Christianity.

I don’t think that being holy is defined by what you do for an occupation or even what you do outside your occupation. It’s about the heart. In any line of work, though, you do have the opportunity to share the gospel with others, and I think that some people did this while in the casino and others did not. There was no mandate by the team to witness in casinos. The primary purpose of being there was to make money. It was a job.

At times, they see their success as sacred–one player calls his clothes closet, which contains a safe with $80,000.00 in it, an “inner sanctum.” But they also depend on the science of card-counting to pay off for them. Which source–the logical or the spiritual–do you think they credited with their success?

I’m pretty sure that when Dusty referred to the “inner sanctum” it was a joke. I’m pretty sure there was nothing spiritual intended with that quote. I don’t think the majority of the players thought that the success was coming from God. Every decision they made in a casino was based on the charts and numbers they’d spent months memorizing. They knew that if they played by those charts, there was a determinable outcome.

With that said, many of the players on the team would pray when they went into a casino. Dusty says that he learned to trust God so much more through blackjack. There are so many things that can go wrong in this endeavor that you quickly realize that you have no control. Because successful card counting is based on longterm results, there are often bad days or times when you drive to a casino 5 hours away only to get kicked out the moment you walk in the door. For Dusty, not being able to control those situations and not knowing if he’d make rent or not made him rely on God. God was the only thing he could count on, so prayer was definitely happening.

The Church Team experiences serious losses, too. Did they interpret their failures as representing an absence of God’s blessing or a problem with their methods?

I’d say a problem with their methods. I don’t think they thought it was God’s absence. Honestly, I didn’t ask that question in the film, and maybe I should have. I suppose there could have been a point where God wanted them to move onto something else and decided not to bless them in this endeavor. I’m not sure.

From my viewpoint, the reason they started losing was primarily because they grew too fast. They trained anybody and everybody to count cards and brought them onto the team. They thought it was something that anyone could do. I think later they realized that it takes a specific type of person to be a good card counter.

One of the pastors who is on the Church Team says, “I baptize someone and then go gamble? Poetic justice.” What does that mean?

I think he just means it’s ironic. It seems very weird and out of the ordinary for a pastor figure to baptize someone and then head to the casinos right after.

That day, we followed Mark as he hung out with his church community. They sang, prayed and he even baptized a girl as the group watched. Later that night, we were driving to a casino in the middle of nowhere. Mark started to realize how crazy that was and was commenting on it. He was starting to feel the wear and tear from being on the road by himself and wanted to be back with the community that he cared about. I think the film shows how much of a grind the job could be at times. It was providing a living for his family and allowing him to spend more time with him church, but but he hated having to travel away from them.

Near the end, one of the ringleaders tells us, “I have no college degree. I have no professional experience. I’m not really willing to work a 9 to 5. I don’t really know what’s around the corner. And I don’t really care.” How do you think that mentality squares with the religious conviction these guys have?

I think it squares up perfectly with their religious convictions. It was primarily an attitude of “not caring” because he is not worried. He wasn’t saying he was going to sit back and do nothing. He was saying that it doesn’t matter what he does next because 1) God has control and 2) it doesn’t matter what his profession is. I think a lot of times we place too much value on what someone does for “work.” It actually becomes their identity when it shouldn’t be. Our identity should be in God and not in what we do to make money.

Such is the sunny message of Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s latest unwatchable foray into filmic sadism.  Why a director of his ability would waste his time (and his estimable cast’s talent) testifying so beautifully to the bleakest nihilism, I don’t know.  But please don’t go see it.  I’d rather we not encourage him.

The first half of the film plays out from the perspective of Justine (Kirstin Dunst), an emotionally fragile new bride suffering through her wedding day at the sweeping estate of her brother-in-law John (Keifer Sutherland, proving to his credit that he is not only and forever Jack Bauer).  Von Trier takes pains to depict her reception as the most opulent social torture, and we (like Justine) want to scramble for the exits after the first toast.

The second half of the film belongs to Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). It takes place after Justine’s wedding (and her benighted marriage’s quick dissolution) and tells the story of the planet Melancholia, which, having hidden playfully behind the sun all these years, has begun a death march–er, death slingshot?–towards Earth. John is convinced that our sunny globe will enjoy a gorgeous near-miss, but everyone else is sure the apocalypse is now. Further, it seems as if the only person prepared for the collision is the by-n0w-extremely-mentally-disturbed Justine, whose depression seems perfectly designed to ready her for the cataclysm.

Seldom has there been a more circuitous argument against Prozac.

The New Yorker‘s David Denby claims he knows the film’s message: of mortal life, “Enjoy it while it lasts.”  But it’s hard to find any enjoyment in this sterile exercise. We are given few alluring options for coping with Melancholia‘s relentlessly blighted landscape. Here are the ones the main characters have chosen, or been forced to choose: Justine–mental illness; Claire–obsessive, manic planning; John–filthy wealth; Justine’s mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling)–biting, bitter sarcasm; her father Dexter (John Hurt)–inebriated senility; her boss Jack (Stellan Skarsgard)–an alienating devotion to business; and her near-husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgard)–vampirism. (I’m kidding about that last one, but Alexander probably wishes he stayed in Bon Temps after the nuptial fiasco Justine’s family puts him through.)

If this is life, what’s to enjoy? Bring on the death-planet!

When I used to teach the book of Revelation in my Bible courses, I always asked my students a simple question: why write an apocalypse? Why tell a story of the end of the world? With respect to the last book of the Christian Bible, there are lots of interesting–and ultimately positive–answers:

Perhaps John wrote his apocalypse to spur flagging believers to renewed devotion. Or to covertly express political dissent. Or to convince the unconverted of the serious-ness of a new religious message. Or to give the oppressed hope that the next world will be better than this one.

But von Trier seems to have only one reason for his end-of-the-world parable: to revel in his characters’ total misery.  To feature–and thus force his viewers to swallow–the worst possibilities of the human experience. Thus, Melancholia completes a dark turn in the director’s oeuvre that began with the similarly unwatchable Antichrist (2009).

This is a turn unworthy of such a great director, and one that ought deter us from his next few features. For me, I’m going to watch Armageddon later tonight to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Melancholia vs. Earth?  No thank you.  But Bruce Willis vs. Lars von Trier? Now that’s a battle I’d like to see.

Movie Poster for the new Muppets Movie starring Jason Segal and Amy Adams

Perhaps you, too, heard the interview with the creative force behind the latest iteration of the Muppets, Jason Segal and Nicholas Stoller, who gave this great interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air today.

But before you spend 40 totally worthwhile minutes listening to that, you should first head to this video essay by Matthew Zoller Seitz and Ken Cancelosi about the Dynamic Duo that was Jim Henson and Frank Oz.  Then you may want to spend the time to read their whole discussion that follows.  They talk about the Muppets in a way that reminds me that the Muppets were more than mere characters, more than just puppets, and more than a diversion for kids; the Muppets help us understand movies, entertainment, comedy, and culture.  Without pretense or pomp, the Muppets were (and hopefully under new direction still are) oracles for a time such as this.

As I am in the position of recommending films to my students, I often receive suggestions from my students, too.  Now, I try to be cautious about watching films recommended to me by high-schoolers, and I was certainly wary about this one: Leaves of Grass.

This 2009 comedy, directed by Tim Blake Nelson (perhaps most memorable as Delmar in the Coen Brothers’ epic O Brother Where Art Thou?), tells the tale of twin brothers, separated not at birth but by vocation, education, and a lot of miles.  Their strained relationship plays out in a tale of academia, deception, death, mistaken identity, and pharmaceutical horticulture.

Edward Norton plays both brothers, Bill steeped in his role as a professor of the classics at Brown, Brady refining the science of growing marijuana for distribution throughout the stereotyped crossbow-carrying backwoods of Oklahoma.  Pug Rothbaum, the synagogue-attending leader of the local drug cartel (played by a smarmy Richard Dreyfus) pushes the drug-dealing Brady to expand his drug trade to pay off the debt he owes, so Brady schemes to bring Bill into town to unwittingly aid in providing an alibi (they do look alike, after all).  But like all mistaken identity stories and grand schemes, the illusion falls apart and brings trouble to the schemer.

Near the end of the film, as Bill confesses to Rothbaum’s Rabbi in his brother’s stead, Bill struggles with why these things happen. Unlike the Rabbis of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, Rabbi Zimmerman is helpful (or at least certain).  The Rabbi responds that “we are animals … with brains that trick us into thinking that we are not.”  “All of us: you, me, your brother, Pug; we break the world,” and she commends Bill to repair it.

Perhaps Leaves of Grass and The Way are more similar than I had initially considered.  Bill’s journey of reconciling with his brother and repairing the world might not be too far different from Emilio Estevez’ film about a journey with a subtext involving drugs, deception, and a brother’s restoration.

(Incidentally, I am eager for a great novelist to give the rapture the Great American Novel treatment. Tom Perotta’s recent The Leftovers uses the rapture as a hook but doesn’t make much sense of it. Rob Stennett’s The End Is Now is much better and smarter about the varied expressions of Christian culture that rapture predictions inspire. But surely Denis Johnson will get around to it someday. He sure oughta.)

In the meantime, we do have a fascinating rapture film, and I’m not talking about church basement freak-fests like A Thief in the Night or Left Behind: The Movie. I’m talking about Michael Tolkin’s surreal, stunning 1991 The Rapture.

For a couple weeks, I’ve been trying to develop a longer post about Tokin’s film and the excellent recent feature on The Rapture at Press Play, but work and life have intervened each and every day. I’m still staring at a big stack of to-do’s, so I’ll just send you on your merry way directly to Press Play, where you can wade into these strange waters for yourself. Alongside a terrific video essay about how The Rapture merges the personal with the theological, Press Play posted Matt Zoller Seitz’s original, contemporaneous review of the film, which contains the weirdest two-sentence combo you’re likely to see in film writing: “Seeing [The Rapture] may make even the staunchest nonbelievers want to go to church,” writes Seitz. And, in the next sentence, “Our guide through this story is Sharon (Mimi Rogers), a telephone information operator who escapes the overpowering dullness of her life through group sex with strangers.”

That gives you some idea of the strangeness of The Rapture. The film might inspire you to read the Bible and place yourself in the fellowship of believers, and it has a couple orgy scenes. Plus, a third act that will make you think you’ve stepped directly into the mind of Harold Camping. Viewer beware.

Thus, it was with envy and relief that I recently discovered that one of my BU colleagues–the brilliant Regina Hansen–has beaten me to it.  Professor Hansen just released a volume she edited entitled Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film: Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual, and Imagery. Among other things, the book begins constructing a theory that accounts for the fact that crosses and demons show up together in so many movies.

In her helpful introduction, she explains the coincidence of religious and fantastic themes in film by suggesting that Catholicism, which claims to be an “authentic locus of supernatural experience,” often appears as “the sole reference to the fantastic in otherwise realistic films.” That reference can evoke either wonder or dread, and it often elicits the latter in horror films. More simply–and provocatively–religion is the entry point that demons, vampires, zombies, and devils often use to come into filmic space.

Professor Hansen and her contributors develop this theme and others in a wide-ranging collection of essays on the “Catholic fantastic.”  So what are you waiting for?  Go buy the book here.

Tuesday night, I walked in to the kitchen to find my two young sons dancing in front of the refrigerator in only their pajama shorts which were inside-out and backwards, one with a pair of Lightning McQueen undies on his head.  I smiled (and laughed) with fatherly pride as the two wriggled and twirled themselves into a frenzy with their bring-us-a-snow-day ritual (completed with the offering of an unblemished ice cube to the porcelain god).   Alas, their sacramental rite went unheeded, and despite the six to twelve inches of hype from the Channel 13 Oracle, there would be no Snow-Day Matinee this week.  I, too, was disappointed as a snow day is a great excuse to watch an old favorite movie, and with its 25th anniversary almost here, it’s time to break out The Princess Bride (thanks to Matthew Zoller-Seitz for pointing me to this link).

Follow this link to The Princess Bride Forever website

Now it’s quite likely that my boys are too young (just 5 and 6) for The Princess Bride, but it has long been my sick- and snow-day movie of choice.  Like the snow day itself, The Princess Bride brings with it the hope of healing, respite, and revival. We watch, even participate with the Grandson (Fred Savage) as Peter Falk narrates Inigo’s quest for vengeance, purpose, and peace; we too, grow concerned and then elated as Westley and Buttercup’s despair is turned to joy.  We hope for justice, we long for redemption, we rejoice in victory.

This website is ostensibly about finding religion in the movies, but I’ve been thinking all week about how the audience also has faith in the movies.  We trust that something in the two-hour diversion will be fulfilling, satisfying, and restorative.  And like my boys with their jammies on inside-out and backwards, I’m trusting that when the hoped-for snow day comes, the day (and the matinee) will bring with it peace.