PUTTING A FACE TO
EVIL
Oscar Sermon Series
“No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be
Blood”
Matthew 4:1-11
Rev. Gary Paterson
February 17, 2008
Well, Saturday morning – a cherished time… coffee and the weekend paper. But then, front section of “The Vancouver Sun” – headline: one right foot, inside running shoe, found on the beaches of Valdes Island. Added to a collection of lost feet – one chopped off foot found last year on Gabriola Island; and before that, another on Jedediah. Police suspect foul play… right! On the front page – cute picture of a little baby… ah, say I… some good news. Except this is baby Angelica… well, who knows if that’s her real name: this is the eight-month old infant abandoned in Toronto at the end of January… and still no luck in discovering any parents or family. Further down… and I’m still on the front page…. a picture of Lee Matasi, the young man who was shot down on Granville street in 2005; his killer, one Dennis White, a thirty year old with a bad attitude, a lot of testosterone, some booze and a gun… as the judge said when he handed down a sixteen year sentence, “Mr. Matasi just happened to cross his path.”
Not quite how I had imagined spending my Saturday morning. So… turn the page, and there’s an article about Mr. Selfert – a former Nazi guard who was finally being kicked out of Canada and sent to Italy where he has been convicted of brutally torturing and killing nine people at an Italian prison camp more than sixty years ago. They called him “The Beast of Bolzano”. Then there was a brief word about the unsatisfactory closing of the Air India inquiry… you remember the plane that was blown up in 1985… 329 innocent people killed to make some kind of political statement. Indeed!
A few more pages further in… last Thursday’s Valentine’s Day massacre at Northern Illinois University …five slaughtered, twenty-nine wounded, and then Stephen Kazmierczak turned the gun on himself. Or what about the account of the man shot dead in his minivan in downtown Vancouver last Friday night… another targeted hit they say; the 6th homicide of the year… I think that makes it one every week this year! And all this before I turn to “The Globe and Mail” to get an update on Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Kenya… well the list goes one.
There’s enough bad news in the world to do you for a lifetime … so why would you ever want to go to the movies like “No Country for Old Men” or “There Will Be Blood” – just the thing to pick you up! On the other hand, maybe we need to go to such movies, just to try and get a handle on what really is happening all around us. Maybe they allow us to take a careful look at violence, evil… terrible things, but at some remove from our immediate context. We can look more carefully at dilemmas, people, situations, with a different perspective, from different points of view. Maybe we can understand the violence all around us, just a bit better… and more courageously, hopefully.
Just this past week a friend was telling me a story from high school days… way back, I know. We were both Vancouver boys, and life seemed simple…until one day a class mate of Hugh’s was attacked by her father wielding a butcher knife, after he had already slashed away at her mother. It’s not what anyone expected in a nice west-side family. Some of the teens who went to church gathered with the minister a short time later; and after venting a lot of feelings, that minister shifted the conversation, saying, “Can you imagine what pain that man must have been feeling to have done something like that to the two people he loved most in the world… his wife and his daughter? And can you imagine what he must be feeling now?” My friend still remembers that moment… the shift from swift condemnation and judgment, to the challenge of trying to understand such terrible behaviour. I wonder if movies help us imagine. As we watch films like No Country for Old Men (OCFOM) or “Thre Will Be Blood” (TWBB) maybe we can put a face to evil? And if so, then what… where’ the hope?
OCFOM and TWBB –they are violent films – and bleak. The bad guys win. This is not the fifties and sixties, when the Censor Board not only regulated all hints of sexuality, but also expected appropriate endings… where the good guys get rewarded, and the bad guys receive their just desserts. But maybe today’s films simply reflect our “take” on the times, where sometimes it feels like the bad guys are winning… war in the Middle East; the globe spinning into one giant meltdown.
Both of these films centre on choices… “You don’t have to do this,” becomes a plaintive cry… “You don’t have to do this.” But he does; we do. N coincidence I think that both OCFOM and TWBB are desert films… literally, both movies shot in the wilderness of northern Texas; and I’m looking with Lenten eyes, remembering Jesus out in the wilderness, facing choices that will determine character, direction and values. Both films are powerful enough to grab you by the throat, and pull you into the story – and maybe you catch a glimpse of yourself somewhere in the movie… somewhere.
Now, one thing I discovered this week is that it is very hard to write a sermon on two movies… the first draft of this sermon clocked in at something like forty-five minutes, and Tim said, “Oh no… back to the study, and start taking out a lot of words.” [You laugh… well, you can say thank you to Tim later.] So I thought I’d start with a poem, which might give us some kind of a handle on these two films…. “Essay on Adam” by B.C. poet, Robert Bringhurst.:
There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried. It’s useless. The fifth,
nothing happened is dull. The possibilities are these:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between themis only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.
I always have been intrigued by this poem, that clever play with words and that great conclusion: “the possibilities are these: he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between them is only an issue of whether the demons work from the inside out, or from the outside in…..” When you see OCFOM and TWBB… well, the demons are alive and well, and seem to be winning the day…And who knows where they come from.
Take TWBB, for instance… and Daniel Plainview -- a prospector with an intense, overwhelming energy, filled with determination, and charisma. In the opening fifteen minutes of the film there is no dialogue… but with eerie music in the background we watch Daniel grubbing away in dark tunnels of the earth, searching desperately for silver, able to live with loneliness, disappointment, a broken leg… he will survive; he will succeed. The thirty year plot line is simple, actually … a man driven by avarice and greed discovers oil, and there is no end to his ambition… more land, more oil, more money, more power… “Ladies and gentlemen… I am an oilman!” En route, Daniel is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone who gets in his way. Mammon is the god he chooses to worship, and the demons are uncorked in his soul. “Can everything be got around here?” he asks. Yes, he discovers; and he gets it… and where your treasure is, there is your heart. In a moment of rare self-exposure, Plainview… and he is, of course, anthing but… Plainview says, “ I want on one else to win!” -- and he will destroy anyone who stands in his way.
He finishes on top of the money pile… alone in his mansion, terribly, psychotically alone; a misanthrope – “I hate most people,” he says. “When I look at them, I see nothing worth admiring.” He lives with the golden curse… all the money in the world and nothing he wants to buy. Somewhere in the unfolding of those thirty years, Daniel has lost his soul.
But it’s hard to know exactly when… because he’s not simply a one-dimensional villain, easy to dismiss. He has an adopted son… “H.W.” is his name. And yes, he uses the boy to present himself as a “family man”, a helpful business tactic that wins him many deals. But it’s more than that… Daniel on the train, staring with bemusement, puzzlement and yes, tenderness, at this infant he has taken on, when the baby’s biological father was killed in an oil rig accident; Daniel holding his boy when an explosion leaves him deaf and frightened; Daniel, for a fleeting moment, near real tears, on his knees at the front of the church, crying, “I have abandoned by child. I have abandoned my child.” But even H.W. cannot save his father… and finally Daviel Plainview rejects his son: “You’re nothing but a bastard in a basket! A bastard in a basket!” he shouts. “You have none of me in you; I am not your father.”
Oh, Daniel is a larger-than-life character. His demons are overwhelming. But let’s not pretend that we don’t know them, that they’re not alive and well. Think of the billions of dollars of profit that Oil companies amassed last year! And, please, what is the war in Iraq but an oil hungry Daniel Plainview writ large… and who cares how many men, women and children are sacrificed on the way.
And in ourselves? Well, my demons don’t seem as dramatic as Daniel’s, so gothic, so over-the-top; but I recognize the temptations… mixing competition and greed, adding a bit of aggression; money, power… no, that’s still too dramatic… but having, and winning, and having more. And watching Daniel’s struggle – his surrender and his destruction… we are forced to ask questions. Those demons… where do the come from. Is it in the bones… the species’ determination to succeed in a Darwinian world, survival of the fittest? Is it locked into Daniel’s genes? Or is it psychological, and the father he ran away from? Or does it arise from the wider culture that offers such rewards for winning at all costs? All the above… is it, frankly, part of being human. It goes with the territory>
Did you know that the first story that gets told in the Bible after Adam and Eve jumped or were pushed, after they are driven from the Garden Eden, that first story ends in murder. Two brothers, Cain and Abel, going at it until one of them ends up dead. Sibling rivalry with a real edge, although the story doesn’t really tell you much about the demons … “[God] had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” No explanations… and then, here we go… “Cain was very angry”… “Don’t be,” says God; and, “Be careful!” But the story ends with a scene that would fit right into “TWBB” -- a body, bludgeoned to death, and blood seeping into the world. Is this our inevitable fate?
Now, with that question floating in the air, let’s take a quick look at NCFOM. Once again a movie with a simple plot… a drug deal gone sideways… eight or nine corpses, half a dozen shot-up pickup trucks, a couple of dogs, gutshot… and a briefcase full of money, two millions dollars worth. Which Llewellyn Moss discovers… a nice enough guy, the one you’re going to identify with through the movie. You watch him staring at the briefcase… do you just walk away? Or is this your big chance? What’s the price… oh hell, you’ll take the chance any how… two million bucks is a lot of money. Trouble is, the drug lords want it back. So Llewellyn finds himself on the run… hunted by Mexican gangsters, a wise-cracking bounty hunter… and … well, here’s where the movies throws in a curve, because maybe the demons also come from the outside in. Llewellyn is also pursued by Anton Chigurh.
The movie action begins with Chigurh’s strangling a deputy sheriff with a pair of handcuffs, quickly followed by his calmly and efficiently blowing apart someone else’s head with his weapon of choice, an air-driven stungun, more usually used to slaughter cattle. Chigurh is a psychopathic serial killer, a human machine with his own twisted logic, who murders in order to get the job done… and sometimes just for sport – “Call it,” he says to some of his victims, as the coin spins up in the air. “You don’t have to do this,” argues Llewellyn’s wife, Carla Jean… “That’s what they all say,” Chigurh replies as he pulls the trigger. He is malevolence embodied, the stuff of nightmares. By the time the movie ends he will have slaughtered 12 people.
Chigurh is evil… think historically, -- Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosovic, Idi Amin, Mugabe; think Ted Bundy, Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, Robert Pickton. As the sheriff says… “Somehere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again..” To look into the eyes of Chigurh is to “put your soul at hazard.”
That sheriff…a well-meaning man, decent; but he they always arrive last upon the scene… after the bad guys have done their work, and departed. The police get to count the dead and inform the widows. Nobody is arrested – and Chigurh goes off whistling back to the desert, carrying the briefcase of money. And the sheriff, well, at the very end of the film, he retires. He quits… feeling … well --. “It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death.” I warned you it was a bleak film.
Now, I was always taught that a sermon couldn’t end without some glimmer of hope, some word of gospel; and all week, as I watched both OCFOM and TWBB for the second time, and struggled with this sermon, I couldn’t find it … not in the films. Not really. But then,I realized, maybe this is the moment to draw the truth of these two films a little closer to the Christian story… not to deny their brutal insights, but simply to hold another truth along side them.
This past week I have conducted two memorial services… and in both of themwe spoke the words of the 23rd Psalm. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” -- through the deserts of OCFOM and TWBB… and through the deserts in my life – “I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Evil is out there, don’t kid yourself. Chigurh is real; he’s not a ghost. “What you dealing with here,” says one character, “it ain’t new.” The valley of the shadow of death is always just around the corner. But the Psalm carries a promise of God’s presence urging us not to fear. “Thou preparest a table before me…” – yes, but….”in the presence of mine enemies.” I like the realism.. we live in a world where there are enemies, evil, the shadow of death; I like the promise… God is with us, so don’t be afraid Me… when I think of Chigurh, I get very very frightened; but sometimes, when I hold onto a promise of holy presence that comes from beyond myself… well, then, sometimes I am strong; and sometimes I can stand up to the demons.
But at the very centre of the Christian story stands the cross. Which is another one of those moments when the bad guys win; when evil carries the day. It happens, despite God’s dream and hope; despite the reality of the Spirit’s presence. A Judas, thirty pieces of silver, a betrayal; Pontius Pilate… the iron fist of the empire; high priests… religious authorities who opt for stability, tradition and power. Chigurh lite…. But Jesus knew… he knew who and what awaited him in Jerusalem; and he went anyhow. He wasn’t about to hide, quit, retire.-- that’s not a gospel option even when you’re scared out of your wits. You speak and live out of a different truth… of love, of non-violence, of self-sacrifice. You stand firm… sustained by the deep promise that nothing… not life or death, not powers or principalities, things past or to come, nor height, nor depth., nor anything else in all creation … nothing can separate us from the love God .(Romans 8:38-9). The promise is that after every crucifixion there is a resurrection. I think that’s what faith is all about… trusting a grace that brings new life out of death. And banking your life on that resurrection promiset…even when it means dying. The demons, working from the inside out, or from the outside in… they do not have the final word.