On Silence and Lament

And things that don't really change

I remembered recently (thanks to the magic of Facebook’s Memories feature) that this week in 2017, I was in Portland, Oregon, giving a talk at a Christian conference, about Martin Scorsese’s film Silence and the idea of lament.

When I thought about the conference, I couldn’t even remember what I said. What I remembered was that those same days, the white supremacist “Unite the Right” event was happening in Charlottesville, and that Heather Heyer was killed by a car driven by James Alex Fields, but that as far as I could tell nobody at the conference was talking about any of it. (I was spending a lot of time alone at the conference, on purpose, because I was sad and tired of it all.)

Anyhow, I just went back to see what I talked about and decided to share it with you, because I don’t think much, if anything, has changed.

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Last year, after a quarter century of meditating on Shusaku Endo's novel entitled Silence, Martin Scorsese finally saw the realization of his long passion project: bringing the novel to the big screen.   

Careful observers of Scorsese’s body of work can detect his long, complicated struggle with matters of faith, with how belief and mystery complicate the way we live in the world as people who are flesh and blood and passion and desire. No wonder: raised an Italian-American Catholic in New York City, the young Scorsese seriously considered becoming a priest before he entered film school. No one would call his filmography a litany of “Christian films.” But from Goodfellas to The Departed, Taxi Driver to The Wolf of Wall Street, his movies are filled with characters resorting to violence, subterfuge, addiction, and empty drives for sex, money, and fame. Read their plot summaries in order, and they sound an awful lot like the lineup of characters in the Old Testament.  

In 1988, Scorsese made The Last Temptation of Christ, a film based on a 1955 novel that imagined Christ as uncertain about his calling and portrayed him being tempted by fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and lust. Scorsese had hoped the film would prompt open dialogue about spiritual issues, and Christ specifically, in the public square. He told the LA Times last year that that Jesus “has to be fully divine and fully human. And the teaching at Catholic schools emphasized the divine to the point where, if Jesus showed up in your classroom, you’d expect him to glow in the dark. So I wanted to get into that duality. But it was seen as a provocation. But the provocation was to think."  

But instead, the film prompted a vehement outcry from many Christian quarters, who picketed and even firebombed theaters where the film was being shown. In one theater in Paris, an attack from religious activists left one viewer burned and several others injured, and it took three years for the theater to reopen.  

Scorsese was drained by the experience, by the criticism and the death threats, many from people who hadn’t seen the film. At dinner one night near the film’s release, the Episcopal bishop Archbishop Paul Moore Jr. told the director he wanted to send him a copy of Endo’s 1966 novel, which told the story of 17th century Portuguese priests on a mission to find their mentor, a missionary in Japan who is rumored to have apostatized. There, they find their faith immensely complicated by encountering Japanese Christians oppressed by a regime attempting to stamp out Christianity, along with any other European influence. The Christians — and eventually the priests — are tortured and even killed unless they agree to stamp on the “fumie,” an image of Christ.  

Endo’s novel is a work of historical fiction, but it’s based in fact. Makoto Fujimura, who has written extensively on the novel and Scorsese’s film, tells me he’s seen fumie in Japan, worn smooth by the stamping feet.  

Scorsese wasn’t able to make Silence right away — but he optioned it way back in 1989, just after he read it. And at last, last year, it was released. I watched it in a full audience of professional critics in New York City about a month before its release, on the same evening it was screening for the Directors Guild. You can’t easily impress film critics, even if you’re Martin Scorsese.   

But an unusual thing happened during our screening, something I’ve never seen in my decade of watching movies with critics in New York. The film is difficult to watch,though it’s lushly shot and acted. There are scenes of torture. But in a theater full of critics, the majority of whom are skeptics, agnostics, and atheists, something palpable settled over us, like a holy hush. We were experiencing something more than a movie together. When it was all over, the room sat in a kind of stunned suspension, unwilling to get up and leave, even though it was 10pm on a Friday night.  

The first time I heard the room’s hush was in a scene where Father Rodrigues, played by Andrew Garfield, and Father Garupe, played by Adam Driver, joyfully and quietly commune with a group of “hidden” Japanese Christians. When they take leave of the group, one man asks them a question that is on everyone’s mind.  

Here we played this clip:

These two men, equally devoted followers of Christ, have not come to the same conclusion about what is acceptable in the eyes of God, and what is not. The reason for this is both marvelously complex and quite simple: the Bible doesn’t say, and the priest’s European culture has no context or answer. To defame the image of Christ by smearing mud from one’s feet on it could be a significant, soul-altering act in a culture driven by images because of their scarcity. But what if one’s life, and the continuation of the church, is at stake? Is it possible to trample and remain faithful? God, on this point, is curiously silent. And his silence begins to throw the priests’ settled beliefs into turmoil.  

It’s not hard to see in this simple question a parallel to Scorsese’s struggle with The Last Temptation of Christ, and with those who threatened him with death for doing what they considered a violent desecration to the “image” of Christ — this time in an image-soaked culture. This experience and the response left a lasting impression on the director.   

And the thing is that God is silent. Scorsese didn’t die. Christianity didn’t either, though violence occurred — both literal and psychological — in Christ’s name. But what is right? And can a person transgress willingly, and still be saved?  

What I see in Silence is Scorsese's lament, which of course takes the form of a film. He laments God’s silence on so many matters that are culturally bound. He laments his long struggle to find Christ in the midst of the madness. In his recently released book Movies are Prayers, the critic Josh Larsen writes about films that function as laments for those who watch them, and he characterizes what they do this way:  

"... Lament, whatever form it takes, is at heart a prayer, an expression of despair in hope of being heard. … keep in mind that Christian lament is not simply complaint. Yes, it stares clear-eyed at the awfulness and even wonders if God has gone ... at its fullest, biblical lament expresses sorrow over losing a world that was once good alongside a belief that it can be made good again."

In the film, Rodrigues is eventually imprisoned by a man called the Inquisitor and told that if he will just repudiate Christ by stamping on the fumie, the Japanese Christians who are being tortured will be saved. Rodrigues tries to argue, steadfast in his belief that while it would be ok for the Japanese Christians to trample in order to avoid death, he, Rodrigues, a man of the cloth and more than just some ordinary Japanese Christian, could never and would never do such a thing.  

But the Inquisitor, chipping away at Rodrigues, eventually gets him what he had come for originally: an encounter with his mentor, Father Ferreira, who indeed did apostasize. Ferreira exhorts Rodrigues as he languishes in his cell.  

“I pray too. It doesn’t help,” Ferreira says. This is what Rodrigues is finding. The God he once felt so close to feels curiously far away. Has he left him? Has he forsaken him?  

The film slowly exposes Rodrigues’s presumptions about his own holiness, and even his sense of superiority to the Japanese which comes from being secure in his salvation. But God’s silence unnerves him. Where is God? The pain, the sorrow, the psychological toil and the broken world become excruciating for Rodrigues, whose once-sure footing is turned upside down as he struggles to make sense of why God doesn’t save him.   

Yet he despairs, with the hope of being heard. And in one of the film’s crucial scenes, God talks back.  

I can’t express to you the emotion in the room full of critics, most of whom have little use for organized religion, when this scene played out. Months later, I still heard people talking about it. “I don’t believe in God,” one person said to another in a row behind me at a critics’ screening a month later at Sundance, “but that scene did something to me that I don’t really understand.”  

“Silence is the only thing that makes me want to believe in God,” another friend told me.  

I am confident that Silence provided Martin Scorsese with a way to both ponder Christ in suffering and also pour out his soul to create a work of art that can lament on our behalf. He made his long-gestating passion project into a kind of conduit for everyone who finds themselves torn up and conflicted by the friction between the church, the culture, their self-perception, and finds themselves crying out with the Psalmist, “How long, oh Lord?”  

Shamefully — but to nobody’s surprise — the church didn’t respond to Scorsese’s self-sacrifice. Silence was praised by many critics, but went virtually unnoticed by most Christian viewers. Some of them have apologetically told me that they just couldn’t watch something that “heavy.” I am afraid for us, my fellow Christians, especially those of us who sit in a position of privilege. We seem more concerned with being encouraged or entertained by what we watch than engaging with art in the fullness of human questioning. I confess I find many reasons to be disappointed by my fellow believers lately, but chief among them is the conviction that we’re no longer able or willing to lament anymore, because we don’t like what it might say about us.  

All I know is what I experienced, and how I saw the film act on those who did see it. Here is how it changed me, which I wrote in my review: 

The genius of Endo’s story and Scorsese’s adaptation is that it won’t characterize anyone as a saint, nor will it either fully condone or reject the colonialist impulses, the religious oppression, the apostasy, or the faltering faith of its characters. There is space within the story for every broken attempt to fix the world. Endo’s answer still lies in Christ, but his perception of Christ is radically different from what most people are familiar with — and even those who don’t identify with Christianity will find the film unnerving and haunting.  

Silence is the kind of film that cuts at everyone’s self-perceptions, including my own. I haven’t been able to shake it, because I need to remember — now, frankly, more than ever — that I am not able nor responsible to save the world, let alone myself. How the world changes is a giant, cosmic mystery. To grow too far from that and become hardened in my own belief is a danger: I grow complacent and deaf, too willing to push others away.  

In Silence, nobody is Christ but Christ himself. Everyone else is a Peter or a Judas, a faltering rejecter, for whom there may be home anyway. What Scorsese has accomplished in adapting Endo’s novel is a close reminder that the path to redemption lies through suffering, and that it may not be I who must save the world so much as I am the one who needs saving.