Addiction And Conversion: Crazy Heart And Transformation

By Alyce McKenzie

I'm not a washed up, fifty-six year old alcoholic country singer who can't maintain relationships, and is on the road playing old hits in rundown bars and bowling alleys and occasionally puking in garbage cans in between sets. So why is it that I identify with Bad Black in Crazy Heart , the novel by Thomas Cobb, recently made into a movie with Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robert Duvall, and Colin Farrell?

I didn't go to Sam's Club last week intending to buy a copy of Thomas Cobb's novel Crazy Heart. I went there to buy ground turkey, toilet paper, coffee, and yellow Gatorade. I resisted the impulse to put a large coconut cake in my cart, but couldn't resist the temptation to turn down the book aisle.

I've always liked Jeff Bridges, so the cover caught my attention. But it was the blurb on the back by somebody from the Chicago Tribune that sealed the sale. "Cobb has created an unforgettable character who engages not only your interest but your emotion... and who proceeds to take you on a roller-coaster ride through his tawdrily tumultuous life."

Now that sounded interesting. I couldn't pass up an opportunity for identification. That's what we do when we connect emotionally with a fictional character. We RSVP to an author's invitation and enter into a fictional world, identify with the protagonist, and join his or her journey through conflict to resolution or at least to an outcome of some kind. So I brought old Bad Blake home and got on my elliptical machine and started reading.

I was a fourth of the way through when my husband stuck his head in the door and asked me if I wanted to go to a movie. So that night we went to see Crazy Heart . Jeff Bridges was completely convincing as Bad. That's why he won an Oscar last week. Maggie Gyllenhaal played Jean Craddock, a music writer who is his love interest. She was a believable blend of vulnerability and determination. That's why she was nominated for an Oscar last week. I enjoyed the music, the characters, the ending.

I identified with Bad who is, in literary terms, a round character rather than a flat one. Flat characters are stereotypes, all good or all bad. He is both. I rooted for Bad the same way I root for myself every day. For both him and me, every day I want the good to overcome the bad. I winced when he drank too much, and huddled over the commode, and lost track of Jean's little boy Buddy, and had sleazy one-night stands with women whose first names I'm not even sure he knew. And I was charmed by his basic kindness, his talent, and his humor. The movie ended with Bad having gone through rehab, committed to staying sober, and enjoying a final sentimental encounter with Jean. It was pretty convincing, but had just a little bit of the "stick-on bow" ending feel to it. Stick-on bows are pretty and effortless, but they don't always stick.

Walking out of the theater, I had the thought: That movie didn't show how Bad found the inner strength to overcome his alcohol addiction. It skipped from AA meeting to clean and sober. I figured such scenes had been in the book, but just ended up on the filmmaker's cutting room floor.

For the next few days, inspired by the movie, I thought about how freedom from addiction is a form of conversion, a turnaround from bondage to a self-destructive behavior to freedom that comes when we commit ourselves to the power of God. I looked up the definition of addiction in a book I have on my shelf. It's a classic by the late psychologist and spiritual counselor Gerald May called Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions. In it he defines addiction as "any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits the freedom of human desire. It is caused by the attachment, or nailing of desire to specific objects. The word behavior is especially important in this definition, for it indicates that action is essential to addiction" (p. 24).

I thought about how quickly Bad in the movie went from heaving over a toilet to cleaned up and on the path to sobriety. Is that what conversion is really like? Is it that easy? New Testament scholar Scot McKnight, author of a recent study entitled Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels, says "conversion is a process, sometimes more sudden than others. At its core, conversion is a process of identity formation in which a person comes to see himself or herself in accordance with the gospel of Jesus Christ" (p. 4). He wrote his book because he noticed that Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelical Protestants are "allergic" to one another's stories of conversion. Which story is the right story? Suddenly being "born again," no turning back? Growing in the faith as mediated by the Church and its sacraments? Some combination of gradual and sudden? For McKnight we all tend to want people to tell the same (conversion) story. "But each person doesn't have the same story to tell. Stories of God's grace differ from person to person" (p. ix).

Once you start thinking about addiction in terms of bondage to something other than God and conversion as the turning away from it toward God, lots of biblical people come to mind. I thought about the Hebrew prophets with their call to people to turn their back on their present behaviors, to turn back to living as God called them to live, and to turn toward a renewed righteousness in their national identity and practice. I thought of Jesus whose call to people, like those of the prophets in whose tradition he stood, was to repent, to confess their sins, and to live in a community whose moral core was righteousness and love. (Repentance in Greek is metanoia , which means to change one's mind; it is the primary term used for the fundamental act of conversion in the gospels.)

I thought of Simon Peter (Mark 1:16-20), Levi/Matthew (Mark 2:13-17; Matthew 9:9-13), Zacchaeus (Luke 19:10-19), Blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52), and the women who were "cured of evil spirits and infirmities" and followed Jesus (Luke 8:1-3). I thought about Paul, whose conversion follows a pattern of turning from one way of life, turning to Christ, and subsequent transformation.

I thought about how, in several of Luke's parables (The Prodigal Son: Luke 15:11-32; The Dishonest Steward: Luke 16:1-8a; and The Unjust Judge: Luke 18:2-5), the protagonist comes to a turning point and undergoes a turnaround in his behavior and actions. I thought about how the wise teachers of Israel taught that two paths stretch out before each of us: wisdom and folly. The path of Wisdom is a straight, well-lit path, a life lived respecting and following God by moderate habits, personal integrity, and concern for the good of the community. The path of Folly is a dark, winding, thorn-filled way, a life lived in the undisciplined indulgence of one's appetites without thought of the consequences for anyone beyond oneself. The call of Wisdom is always to leave the path that leads to death (folly) and enter the path that leads to life (wisdom).

With the picture of Bad clean and sober in the movie's final scene before my eyes, I savored these thoughts about the parallels between the freedom from addiction and conversion. There is always the possibility of making better choices with God's help. God's redemptive power offers second chances.

I considered not finishing the novel Crazy Heart since I already knew how it ended. But that seemed unfair to the author, so I read it at night for a few days before going to bed. I've heard that it's good to read uplifting things before going to sleep. I finished it last night, and, as it turned out, that wasn't the best way to end my day. Because the novel, unlike the movie, ends with Bad, having gone through rehab, relapsing and ending up drunk in a ditch. That's the ending Thomas Cobb, the author of the novel Crazy Heart, gave it when it was published over twenty years ago in 1987. It got good reviews, but was pulled out of print after selling 11,000 copies. Cobb, now an English professor at Rhode Island College, wrote the book as his doctoral dissertation.

A friend gave a copy of Crazy Heart to Scott Cooper, an actor and "wannabe" director with a love of country music. He decided to adapt it into a screenplay and then directed the movie.

Here is what Cooper said about the happy ending he gave the movie:

Crazy Heart is about the fact that we all have second chances in life, and regardless of our flaws, because we're all flawed, we can really seek redemption and salvation. Some things are more filmable than others, more palatable than others, and I wanted the story to have a more redemptive ending than the novel.

What didn't come through in the movie is that, apparently, while we can seek redemption and salvation, we can also reject it. Why anyone would is a mystery as inscrutable as that of God's forgiving Grace. But we do. Earlier in the book there's a flashback to Bad hearing hellfire and brimstone sermons in the little country church of his youth. Throughout the book, clues to his sense of guilt and uneasiness with God come through. Right before his relapse into the ditch, his AA counselor Linda tells him, "God didn't make you an alcoholic, you did that yourself. But He can get you free." For reasons we aren't fully told or shown, Bad goes back to the bottle.

Cobb's response to the discrepancy between his novel's ending and the movie's ending is that he loves the movie, loves the response it has gotten, and realized that once he sold the rights, it was out of his hands. "The book and the film are separate works," he said.

The endings certainly are. It's a choice between Redemption and Relapse. It's a choice between a once-for-all, fast and easy conversion (movie) and what may be a once-for-all, fast and final failure (novel).

Which ending is a confused novel reader/movie viewer to choose? How about neither?

I don't want a fast and irrevocable conversion. That's not been my experience. My experience has been that, when conversion becomes complacent, preening in the mirror, admiring its own permanency, that's when we are most vulnerable to being overpowered by cravings we thought were a thing of the past.

I agree with New Testament scholar McKnight -- conversion is a process. Since God is always available to forgive and empower change, relapse is never the final word, no matter how many times we've ended up in the same ditch. It could be a step toward transformation. Anything is possible with God.

Effortlessly clean and sober? Irrevocably drunk and ditch bound? We're all wannabe disciples who aren't out of the woods yet. There's bound to be a better ending for our story than a stick-on bow or being stuck in the ditch.

Alyce M. McKenzie is a Professor of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.

Addiction and Conversion: Crazy Heart and Transformation