Missing Marpa

I’ve uncharacteristically been spending a lot of time on YouTube lately (no, really, I can stop anytime!) as research for a course I’m teaching on art and philosophy, looking for evidence of religious art as functional. What I’ve been hearing typically from my students has been one of two ideas about what art is: either, art is decidedly non-functional and exists in some kind of hermetically sealed box containing the opaque, indecipherable emotions of the artist; or, everything is art, from paintings to buildings to forests, dependent entirely upon individual relativism to create meaning.

Definitions of art are inherently problematic, but I hope to illustrate that much of the artistic output over the course of human history has been at the service of religious devotion and philosophical inquiry. The architecture and adornment of religious buildings not only tells us something about a tradition, it does something.

What that something is, however, can vary drastically. Devotional rituals to Shiva, when compared to Zen meditation or a Christian liturgy, can illustrate both what is similar but also what is profoundly different about these respective traditions.

To illustrate all of this, I tell stories: Shiva is blue because he drank up poison from the oceans, and his dance both destroys and recreates the universe; or, Muhammad journeyed to Jerusalem upon the back of a flying beast and then ascended a ladder to heaven.

Stories like these are what first drew me to the study of religion, and telling them always gives me great joy. Patton’s recent post that a certain someone is about to direct a feature film about Noah makes me giddy.

However, despite all of the religion that we find in films–all of the movies that are about religion–it seems to me that the foundational texts of most of the major traditions have been profoundly neglected by Hollywood.

Of course there’s The Passion of the Christ and The Ten Commandments, but outside of Jesus, Moses, and maybe David, there’s a real dearth of cinematic depiction of religious tales. Perhaps some of the best ones out there are animated, which I’m all for, but I can only take so much Veggie Tales (besides, they’re sell-outs). And when it comes to Islam, all sorts of theological problems ensue, despite the best efforts of The 99. And this is pretty cool . . .

. . . but wouldn’t we all have been better off if James Cameron had had some decent source material for his blue man fantasy? Why do we so often think religious stories, at least the source material, is fit only for children? In creating so many cartoons, are we betraying the dark secret in our souls that we think these stories are actually, well, childish? When Bible stories get played straight, they often embarrass–but I don’t think it’s the story’s problem. Our seriousness, our belief, makes these tales difficult to tell, I think, because of a reversal of the suspension of disbelief: if we see it at the movies, we know it isn’t true, but if we’re watching stories that our faith tells us must be true, what do we do?

So, I want to take a poll or get some feedback. One, what are the best film versions of religious stories? I don’t mean films like Magnolia and its mash up of contemporary America with the plagues of Moses, or documentary style examinations of the life of the Buddha, nor even heroic accounts of figures like Joan of Arc. Instead, I’m thinking about films that try to take us back to the near-mythical time of a tradition’s origins. Something more like this brilliantly kitsch version of The Mahabharata by Peter Brooks:

Second, what religious stories would you most like to see brought to the big screen? For my money, Samson and Delilah deserves a proper re-telling, and The Life of Milarepa would be all sorts of fun. You?