Interestingly, no reviewers I found questioned Liddell\u2019s religious commitment. Whether one appreciated it or not, it was apparently fully believable. How did Chariots<\/i> achieve this authenticity? First, it presents Christian commitment as rooted in religious community rather than in religious individualism. A lengthy part of the film establishes Liddell\u2019s answerability to his family and community in Scotland. He is not shown socializing with other runners at the Olympics; his relationships with them are friendly but distant. Second, voice-over and interior dialogue are used at crucial points throughout the film to reveal the commitments, not only to religious ideas but also to people, that inform Liddell\u2019s convictions. By contrast, Abrahams\u2019 Jewishness, even though it is explicitly pictured as essential \u2014 even the key \u2014 to his character and motivation, is not articulated. Abrahams is not shown as having family, community, or religious practices. In the scene in which he describes to Ashley Montague what Jewishness means to him, Abrahams shows Montague a picture of his father. But the camera, and therefore the viewer, does not see it. Abrahams talks about his father, but the father never becomes visible to the viewer. The filmic isolation of a character signals his otherness in relation to the perspective assumed by the film, usually that of its protagonist.<\/p>\n
Eric Liddell \u201cruns to honor God.\u201d What form of Christianity does the film represent? Not one, I suggest, that can be counted on to be immediately sympathetic to a popular audience in the United States or in Great Britain. Liddell\u2019s Church of Scotland espouses a Calvinistic doctrine that believes in the total depravity of humankind; salvation cannot be earned but is granted to the few who have been predestined to receive it. Scripture is believed to be the literal Word of God and the absolute rule for faith. And, according to Scottish Presbyterians, God has stipulated how God is to be worshipped:<\/p>\n
He hath appointed one day in seven for a sabbath, to be kept holy unto him . . . in which [men] observe a holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts, [and their] worldly employments and recreations. (Westminster Confession xxi)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It is this tenet of 1920s Scottish Presbyterianism that provides Chariot<\/i>\u2018s central narrative conflict. I will discuss it shortly.<\/p>\n
Scottish Presbyterianism in the early twentieth-century developed what was called a muscular Christianity. Vigorous missionizing was one of the evidences of muscular Christianity. Both in life and in the film, Eric Liddell gave up a career in running to become a missionary to China. Presbyterian missions in China were in their heyday in the 1920s, a time between the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in which thousands of Chinese Christians and many missionaries were killed, and the revolution of 1949 when the Communists came to power and denounced foreign missionaries as agents of Western imperialism.<\/p>\n
The dogmatism and aggressive missionizing of Scottish Presbyterianism is glossed over by its setting as a period piece. It is also masked by filmic devices \u2014 especially the hymns sung by Scottish Christians and by Anglicans \u2014 that imply its fundamental identity with Anglican liberalism. Moreover, Calvinism\u2019s belief in the total depravity of all human beings is never alluded to in the film, helping to make Eric Liddell\u2019s religion sympathetic to popular audiences. . . .<\/p>\n
Chariots<\/i> explicitly exposes the anti-Semitism of Abrahams\u2019 elite Cambridge college and sympathetically represents the pain it causes, but the film nevertheless subverts its own critique in several ways. First, it represents Liddell\u2019s and Abrahams\u2019s personalities as stereotypes: Liddell is friendly, has a sense of humor, is outgoing and usually takes himself lightly; Abrahams is moody, intense, and lacks humor. Liddell is presented as self-assured and likable, Abrahams as difficult, defensive, and monomaniacal. Liddell runs to \u201cgive God pleasure,\u201d while Abrahams runs to show a dominantly Christian culture that he can \u201crun them off their feet.\u201d A dominantly Christian audience in Great Britain and North America could be expected to find Liddell\u2019s motivation more heroic, especially when viewers learn, at the end, of his death as a Christian martyr.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, spectators are much more likely to identify with the film characters whose subjectivity we have access to than with those we merely see acting in certain ways. Abrahams\u2019 self-talk is heard only after he loses an important race, when obsessive images of losing the race occupy his mind. Viewers are encouraged to identify with Liddell, however; at several crucial points we hear the interior voices that explain his motivation or agonize over the conflict he feels. . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For whatever that\u2019s worth; make of all that what you will.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Much has been said about how Amazing Grace has tweaked history to make William Wilberforce more palatable to modern, even liberal, audiences. Some have also pointed out that the film was originally written by Colin Welland, writer of Chariots of Fire (1981), before Steven Knight was brought on board to write a script that focused […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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