Super 8 and the Real Presence, Part 3

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

John 15:4

Communion: the third constituent of “real presence.” “What differentiates real presence from just being with others in a crowd,” writes Father Cameron, “is belonging: unity in charity, forgiveness, helping people, self-sacrifice, intimacy. We long for this oneness with others; united with the one who loves me, I can face any fear…I am up to any challenge. In the Most Holy Eucharist, wrote John Paul II, “is the pledge of the fulfillment for which each man and woman, even unconsciously, yearns” (Ecclesia de Eucharista 59).”

In Super 8 J.J. Abrams plays with this theme of communion in the relationships between the kids, in the relationships between Joe and Alice and their fathers, and in the relationship between Joe and Alice themselves. But it also arises in a curious way in regard to the alien menace. The kids’ biology teacher at their middle school, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), is a former government employee at Area 51, and knows all about the alien. For years he has been hiding his research on the monster, including a Super 8 film showing him being attacked by the alien at an Area 51 facility. After he is captured by the U.S. Air Force, Woodward reminds his interrogator, Nelec (Noah Emmerich), that a kind of psychic connection has been forged between him and the alien. “He lives in me,” says Woodward, “and I in him”—an echo, wittingly or not on Abrams’ part—of both John 15:4 and Galatians 2:20.

There is something in the alien’s touch that causes this strange connection. So that when the alien picks Joe up in their climactic encounter, Joe also enters into psychic communion with it (as do, presumably, the other people whom the alien captures, such as Alice). But it’s not clear what all this amounts to. The alien does listen to Joe’s plea in the climactic scene (see Tuesday’s post), but it seems to be the plea itself, rather than the psychic connection of which Woodward speaks, that persuades the alien to let Joe go. At least when it comes to the alien, then, this theme of communion, of entering into the very life of the other, enters as a bit of sci-fi mysticism but it is never really explored.

In a film in which the principal theme is how to go on living in the face of death (again, see Tuesday’s post), it is tempting to wonder whether the alien might be an image of supernatural life. But nothing in the film supports this possibility. True enough, the alien is from another, unknown world, and does turn out to have a benevolent side. But rather than representative of a transcendent realm, the alien is more a projection of Joe’s—and Alice’s—own psychic life, an imaginary friend with super-human strength and intelligence, but with the same emotional needs. Right before the climax in which he is captured by the alien, Alice tells Joe that the alien, like them, is just scared and lonely and wants to go home. So that when Joe tells it, “Bad things happen—but you can still live,” the alien realizes that it is being spoken to by a kindred spirit. The alien then lets Joe go, quickly finishes rebuilding its ship, and goes home, leaving all of us to wonder: what does the movie mean when it declares that we can “still live” in the face of bad things?

It means, I take it, that we can still live in the loving relationships we have with other living people—and not by trying to hang on to those who have gone before us (the last thing the magnetic attraction of the alien’s space ship draws to it is the locket in which Joe keeps a picture of his dead mother). There is obvious wisdom in this. Super 8 is undoubtedly affirming the real presence that is achieved through forgiveness, helping other people, self-sacrifice, and intimacy—and for that reason it has the “heart” that Abrams has said he strove to give to the film. And yet, apart from some fleeting images of a church (or synagogue?), Super 8 leaves no room for expanding that presence through the experience of Divine intimacy. In the film, communion is wholly and exclusively a human achievement, played out in a world underneath a heaven containing nothing more than creatures just as strange as ourselves. Writes Father Cameron, “Pope Benedict teaches us “that “communion always and inseparably has both a vertical and a horizontal sense: it is communion with God and communion with our brothers and sisters” (Sacramentum Cartitatis 76).””

As so in reflecting upon Super 8, as so often when I think about contemporary films, I am reminded of the words uttered by Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel, The Moviegoer: “the movies are onto the search, but they screw it up.” 

Super 8 and the Real Presence, Part 2

It is not, of course, that J.J. Abrams in his new film Super 8 is saying anything explicit about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. My point, rather, is that for all its character as a “summer popcorn movie” (Abrams’s own description), Super 8 reflects our culture’s hunger for the experience of “real presence” in our ordinary lives—and therefore, on a deeper level, the hunger for the most Real Presence of all.

In his lead editorial of the June 2011 Magnificat, Father Peter John Cameron names three constituents of real presence on both the human and supernatural levels: commitment, communication, and communion. Yesterday I considered the theme of commitment in Super 8; today I want to say a word about the theme of communication.

It is no coincidence, Father Cameron observes, that receiving the Eucharist at Mass is called “communicating.” For it is in the Eucharist that the faithful enjoy the most intimate encounter with the Lord possible on this earth, in which we have a chance to speak but more importantly to listen. “The goal of conversational communication and eucharistic communication is the same,” writes Father Cameron, “the sharing of self with the other. Pope Benedict XVI says that conversation between people only comes into its own when they are no longer trying to express something, but trying to express themselves….” Real communication, on both the human and supernatural levels, is a meeting in that quiet, hidden place where, in the motto of Cardinal Newman, cor ad cor loquitur: “heart speaks to heart.”

The name of Abrams’ movie is Super 8. The name comes from the type of motion picture film stock—8 mm, made by Kodak—popular with home movie enthusiasts in the 1970s. In the movie, the tween protagonist Joe Lamb and his friends are making a Super 8 zombie film, a movie that eventually helps the kids rescue their town from an alien menace. Thus Abrams harks back to his own childhood as a Super 8 film enthusiast (ironically, years before Abrams met Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of Super 8, he was paid $300 by Spielberg’s company to clean up some of Spielberg’s own boyhood Super 8 films). So the first thing that Abrams wants to communicate about his film is that it is about filmmaking—the most characteristic form of communication of our age. Super 8 celebrates kids in an era where DIY filmmaking is surging to the fore, kids yearning to express themselves through this exciting new medium that they now have the means to control. True, what the kids are making is a cheesy zombie movie—stay for the credits after Super 8 and you’ll see the hilarious finished product. But as I noted yesterday, their film can be seen as an adolescent meditation, equal parts puerile and charming, on the meaning of death. Interestingly, their finished film ends with the detective in pursuit of the zombies saving his zombified wife by injecting her with an antidote. The main theme of Super 8 is thus recapitulated in the kids’ own Super 8 film: loving sacrifice enables one to remain alive even when “bad things happen.”

Related to this theme of filmmaking as communication is the eagerness of Charles (Riley Griffiths), Joe’s best friend and the writer-director of the kids’ film, to find “production value”—elements that will make the film seem more real. When the train carrying the alien first comes around the corner near the station where the kids are filming, Charles orders everybody quickly into place so that they can get the real train in the background of the shot. So too when the kids use the Air Force as a backdrop when it scours the town for evidence of the missing alien’s presence. Filmmaking for the kids, as it is for our culture, is a way of making things real, of getting to the real, of finding that “value” in which we encounter—not simply trains and soldiers—but that “other” with whom we can express our heart.

Heart speaks to heart in Super 8 not only through the medium of film, but also through conversation. Because of their lack of commitment to their children, both Joe’s father and Alice’s father are unable at the outset to communicate with them. Joe’s father would even like to send his son to six weeks at a baseball camp, simply to be relieved of the burden of having to care for him. Later in the story Joe reacts angrily to his father’s failure to communicate with him, shouting at his father that he doesn’t even know him.

Apart from his last-ditch speech to the alien at the climax of the film, it is in his relationship with Alice that Joe experiences the genuine communication he longs for. One of the nicest things about Super 8 is that it doesn’t push this budding tween romance too far. The kids spend time alone together, even sneaking out at night to do so, but Abrams is wise to keep the relationship innocent. What is nice is that the kids are far more interested in talking to one another. They are starving for communication—to be known. So that even when they are alone together at night in Joe’s room, they spend the time talking about Joe’s mother’s death and watching Super 8 movies of Joe as a baby with his mother.

The need to communicate who one is and to receive the real presence of another: this is a second lesson of Super 8. Tomorrow we'll take a look at the theme of communion in the film. 

Super 8 and the Real Presence

It is no slight to the new J.J. Abrams film, Super 8, that while I was watching it I was thinking of the editorial by Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P. at the front of this month’s Magnificat. Super 8 is just about everything one could want from a summer blockbuster—thrills, chills, comedy and heart. Abrams is a master of high concept storytelling—and judging from the success Super 8 enjoyed in its opening weekend, not to mention the successes of Abrams’ other projects, e.g., the television series Alias and Lost, and the feature film, Star Trek, it is clear that his stories are giving a large portion of our culture something that it badly longs for. Which is where Fr. Cameron’s editorial comes in.

Fr. Cameron notes a recent survey concluding that close to fifty percent of American Catholics do not understand the Church’s teaching on Christ’s Real Presence—body, blood, soul and divinity—in the Eucharist. He speculates that a big part of the reason for this is that we do not understand “real presence” in our daily lives—on account of which the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist becomes an abstraction. “People have no frame of reference for seeing its relevance to their needs.”

I think it’s true that our culture in many ways undermines the experience of “real presence” in everyday life, and thus contributes to the disconnect between even acknowledged believers and Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. But I also think that the success of Super 8 shows that our culture maintains a deep longing for “real presence,” not to mention Real Presence, especially when we consider the three constituents of “real presence” according to Fr. Cameron: commitment, communication, and communion.

Let’s begin with commitment. Fr. Cameron writes that commitment begins “very simply by giving the person in front of me my undivided attention.” He refers to Blessed Pope John Paul II’s remarkable ability to make the person he was looking at feel as if he or she was the only person in the world. In Super 8, the virtue of eye contact is very much in play when the tween protagonist, Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), describes to his friend, Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning), the way in which his (now deceased) mother used to look at him so intensely. It was in her gaze, Joe says, that he felt “alive,”—a feeling he tries to keep fresh by carrying a locket with his mother’s picture inside. Super 8 is a film about finding that place where we can feel confidently alive in the commitment of the other. In one way it is a movie about death. The opening scenes depict the aftermath of the death of the Joe’s mother. The story takes place in the town of Lillian, Ohio—the lily being one of the most traditional images of death. Joe is the “lamb” led to slaughter. The super 8 movie that Joe and his friends are making, and that leads to their encounter with the alien, is a zombie film—a projection, one might say, of their fear and fascination with death. But Super 8 questions how one can maintain the sense of being alive even in the face of death. As Joe tells the alien at the climax, in another moment of close eye contact in which trust and commitment are forged, “Bad things happen…but you can still live.”

While death is the biggest obstacle to commitment in the film, the family dysfunction that in part results from death also looms large. When Super 8 begins, the very first image that comes on screen, even before the story itself gets underway, is the famous silhouette image from E.T. that Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of Super 8, uses as the logo for his production company, Amblin Entertainment. In that silhouette image we see Elliott, the boy protagonist of E.T., cycling in front of the full moon with the alien E.T. in the basket of his bike. E.T. is not only, through Spielberg, a kind of commercial ancestor of Super 8; it is also Super 8’s creative and emotional ancestor. Spielberg has said that he made E.T. as a way of meditating upon his boyhood as the child of divorced parents. Super 8 also deals with family dysfunction, not through divorce, but through the disconnect between Joe and his father (Kyle Chandler) in the wake of his mother’s death, as well as through a similar disconnect between Alice and her single-parent father (Ron Eldard), who drinks and emotionally abuses her. But after the encounter with the alien which puts both Joe and Alice in grave danger, both fathers discover the need to commit wholly and entirely to the well-being of their children. They discover the importance of the gaze, and the touch, that registers true commitment.

The root of man’s wretchedness, Father Cameron quotes Pope Benedict, “is loneliness—is the fact that my existence is not embraced by a love that makes it necessary.” Super 8 ends with the embraces of two fathers in which the lives of their children are confirmed as necessary. “I’ve got you,” Joe’s father says to him as he hugs him—meaning, perhaps, not only that he has got Joe back physically, but also that he has finally “got” what Joe needs from him as a father.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at Super 8 and the theme of communication.