Last week I saw 1947\u2019s Powell & Pressburger convent fever dream Black Narcissus<\/em>. It\u2019s set in the high, windswept mountain peaks of India (with requisite \u201chalf devil and half child\u201d native caricatures, so just know that going in\u2013I really liked the blunt old lady though), where an iron-spined young Anglican nun played by Deborah Kerr tries to run a convent in a former house of concubines. It\u2019s stunning to look at, of course, and I am not kidding about the \u201cfever\u201d aspect of this dream: It heads startlingly far into suspense or even Suspiria<\/em> territory by the end. Great, red-meaty stuff.<\/p>\n At first, though, it seems like a standard nun movie. Nun movies are often also movies about women\u2019s leadership (Bresson\u2019s Angels of Sin<\/em> is my favorite in this sub-sub-genre) and Black Narcissus<\/em> nicely exploits the way the religious setting allows the women to be totally open about their clash of egos\u2026 for a while. The early conversations about starting the convent, and about Sister Clodagh\u2019s (Kerr) self-importance, are sharp and kind of thrillingly direct.<\/p>\n But another typical aspect of nun flicks is almost totally absent here. Not to be indelicate, but aren\u2019t nun movies supposed to be about God?<\/em> Not Black Narcissus<\/em>! I\u2019m not sure who God is, for these nuns. Disciplinarian? (In one exchange between Sister Clodagh and the requisite dissipated, super-cute Englishman, the nun snaps, \u201cWithout discipline we should all be like children.\u201d He answers, obviously, \u201cDon\u2019t you like children?\u201d) English culture itself? (The nuns are bizarrely unwilling to teach the local princeling about Jesus; he\u2019s not the right kind of student, not spiritual or serious enough.) Something taken so much for granted that it doesn\u2019t have a name, or maybe just a projection of the nuns\u2019 own inner will to power?<\/p>\n What God is in this movie is a kind of oppositional force, which turns the nuns crosswise to \u201cthe world\u201d\u2013however you want to define the world. They can\u2019t dissolve into ordinary moral lassitude like the English heartthrob; they can\u2019t dissolve into nature like the local holy man. They are denied the release of the Nietzschean Dionysos. So yes, this is a movie about whether a nun\u2019s gonna have sex. But that\u2019s because it\u2019s a movie about whether a nun can have the shattering, self-emptying surrender of will which this movie\u2013kind of startlingly\u2013sets up as the opposite of Christian duty.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I saw 1947\u2019s Powell & Pressburger convent fever dream Black Narcissus. It\u2019s set in the high, windswept mountain peaks of India (with requisite \u201chalf devil and half child\u201d native caricatures, so just know that going in\u2013I really liked the blunt old lady though), where an iron-spined young Anglican nun played by Deborah Kerr […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[147,263,119,133,215],"class_list":["post-7161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-apollo-and-dionysos","tag-brass-monkery-that-funky-monkery","tag-horror","tag-mask-of-command","tag-nietzsche"],"yoast_head":"\n