This essay is the first in a series exploring the modern desire for transcendence through films. Or to quote the recently released Mother Mary, “Where do ghosts go when you don’t need them anymore?”
In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor traces the development “which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” 1Taylor wasn’t simply lamenting a decline in religious identification or participation, nor was he making an argument for or against the separation of church and governing authorities. Against these more popular understandings of secularization, Taylor analyzes how the “conditions of belief” have transformed throughout the last few centuries.2
The primary threads of these changes have involved the gradual disenchantment of the world—we no longer perceive our world as filled with mystery and inexplicable powers—and the fact that belief in God or any divinity is now one of many available options. Our contemporary society provides us with a constellation of possibilities in which to seek meaning. But as Taylor incisively notes, this does not mean our impulse for transcendence has evaporated. It is still present, but it doesn’t always know which source of meaning to attach to. We are now left to “search for something within, or beyond… which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence.”3
Mother Mary declares that the modern age is not so impervious to the spiritual as it would like to think.
So what does this search for transcendence look like in our contemporary society? Journalist Tara Isabella Burton takes up this question in her book Strange Rites, where she defines our society as a “remix culture.” Burton observes that, for many people, the longings that institutionalized religion once fulfilled are now found in piecemeal fashion within a variety of sources. Those longings include “a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with, and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable, everyday life.” We are free to locate various potential sources for meaning. Two pertinent questions then arise: Do those sources fulfill our longings or fail to do so? And even if they are able to satisfy us, how do they shape us in the process?
More particularly, this series will ask: How do movies unveil facets of this longing? As Burton notes, modern humanity is just as likely in its search for meaning to turn to wellness culture, online fanfiction communities, social justice, far right extremism, and more. Welcome to the modern age. So we should not expect our movies to demonstrate straightforward examples of religion. Rather, our films will reflect the longing for transcendence and our frustration with a world seemingly void of it through a myriad of unexpected forms.
What sort(s) of transcendence can we discover in the movie theater? The series begins with one of the most recent cinematic exemplars of modern transcendence. Mother Mary, currently in theaters, depicts just how troubling the spiritual realm is to our modern life.
Mother Mary Awaits the Day of Her Pentecost
David Lowery’s Mother Mary occurs at the point of collision between disparate worlds. First, there’s the world of the pop icon Mary (Anne Hathaway). Her world is a rarefied atmosphere lit by stadium lights and populated by adoring fans, and its geography loses distinct signifiers as Mary moves from one anonymous arena to the next. By giving Hathaway’s character a stage name that echoes Madonna and a stage presence that inevitably evokes Taylor Swift, Lowery is clearly structuring this world within a familiar pop cosmos. But this world is contrasted with the world of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), Mary’s former dress designer. The two had been close—nearly one in the confluence of their creative projects—but after years of partnership, Mary turned to another fashion designer. Sam took it as a betrayal and cut her world off, retreating to a dusty, anachronistic English estate. As she puts it, she’s entered her “Miss Havisham period.” The great expectations she once felt now shattered, Sam tries her best to ignore Mary’s ever-present stardom. She refuses to listen to Mother Mary’s songs and avoids watching news clips about her old friend. But when Mary shows up at her studio demanding an Anselm dress for her next show, these worlds can’t remain separate any longer.
Mary’s next concert is an attempt at a comeback after a tragic mid-show accident (that was possibly no accident) nearly resulted in her death. The truth is that Mary hadn’t been feeling like herself for a long time even before the accident, and she begs Sam to create a dress that feels like her. Sam begrudgingly obliges, but she’s not going to make any part of this process easy on Mary. As the wounds Sam bears are reopened, a sharp bitterness flows out, cauterizing Mary for her lack of remorse. While Sam sketches designs and cuts away reams of fabric, she also shears through the relational ghosts that haunt the two women.
A specter lurks in the unstated emotions, hinted at by the juxtaposition of settings. This is a haunted world. At first it appears modern and mundane: What could be more banal to contemporary life than another popstar selling out tours? But such a world can’t escape the moody, inspirited world that Sam has made her home. The possibility of ghosts isn’t as far away as Mary (or we) would like to believe. Sam, on the other hand, is nearly aware of this possibility: At one point she declares that they are to “await the day of our Pentecost.” Pentecost is a particular and unexpected word to show up in a movie like this, yet when it comes to the realization of her designs, Sam is as skilled with stitching together delicate words as she is with silk or velvet. Coel revels in Lowery’s script, making the most of every minor reaction and every extended monologue. The screenplay is richly symbolic and intricate, and it’s both here and in the visuals that Mother Mary’s religious subtext makes its presence felt.
On stage, Mary is consistently crowned with a halo via bespoke headpieces that sometimes glitter in the light and sometimes evoke martyrdom with rusty nails. Sam’s favorite dress cast Mary as Joan of Arc, complete with armored decoration. Meanwhile, the designer refers to the memory of her first communion, and she speaks of the reverential power that Mother Mary casts over her devoted acolytes. With all of this layered religious energy, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when the script moves to séances and exorcisms. As Sam and Mary confront their past, they do arrive at their Pentecost, complete with the touch of a fiery tongue. But what sort of spirit can we expect to descend in the modern world?
The Prescription of True Meaning
Like The Green Knight before it (which we’ll turn to in the next article), Mother Mary depicts the struggle of the modern world to remain rational. Taylor describes our modern experience with the phrase “buffered selves” to contrast the experience of life as “porous” (i.e., vulnerable) to spiritual powers beyond our control and understanding. The “buffered” self lives within “an immanent order… without reference to interventions from outside” (e.g., without reference to God, angels, demons, ghosts, etc.).4 Mary’s world is our world, familiar and explicable and knowable, and her life is doubly buffered by both modernity and the insulation of fame. But as Taylor notes, “something replaces the spirit world of yore, even for the buffered self that has shut it out. That is, there is still something we need protection from.”5 Something still slips through, something unearthly that refuses to be ignored. It’s not just a dress that Mary’s searching for from Sam. It’s protection, but it will require her to confront the porous nature under her shining armor.
As he imagines how people in a secular age will find transcendent meaning, Taylor observes that they will be more likely to be “moved by a ‘mystique’” than to identify with the institutionalized tradition of organized religions.6 Meaning will spark from a sense of something that can’t be explained away. Lowery’s films often center on characters whose ordered worlds are unsettled by just such a mystique. It sends them on a quest through paths unfamiliar and to a destination unknown. Mother Mary continues this project: it’s mystique that haunts the film, and it’s mystique that persists in a numinous ambiguity. Is this shade really a ghost or just another hue of fabric? Is it a spirit animated by séance or merely the pain conjured by unreconciled animosity? Lowery’s vision of modernity insists on the unanswerable nature of the story. There will be no final clarity (to the frustration of some viewers), but this is true to the modern longing for transcendence. Taylor notes that the modern individual must confront that “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection” that their chosen path is the right one.7
Mother Mary declares that the modern age is not so impervious to the spiritual as it would like to think. Sam wonders at how Mary’s betrayal haunts her, marveling at “how much space you occupy in the entirety of me,” and the line also clarifies that these two worlds aren’t isolated at all. Instead of being separated or distant, the spiritual mystique suffuses the entirety of our world even as its presence goes unacknowledged. At the same time, Lowery’s film maintains that the nature of this mystique can’t be defined. It must remain mysterious.
Few scenes in Mother Mary are as incisive about the modern condition as the moment of exorcism itself. Sam gathers various items from around her studio: a pair of scissors, some pins, a cutting of fabric. Taken aback, perhaps nervous about the sharpness of many of these objects, Mary asks what the items are for. Unperturbed, Sam replies cheerily that there’s “no true meaning to any object beyond our prescription.” So the scissors will now be a key to unlock any obtrusive doors, the pins are to be the swords they wield against their foes, and the cloth will be their shield in the upcoming battle. But as much as this prescription is role-play, it is also meaningful. Sam isn’t being flippant; she believes these objects will be necessary for them to encounter the transcendent and make it through alive. Such is the modern impulse toward transcendence. The newfound freedom of the buffered, individualistic self means that they can seek cosmic meaning outside of religious institutions, but this also places an existential burden on their shoulders. The result is a flexible play of meaning (think of Burton’s “remix” analogy) where meaning is attributed to the objects by the individual. So scissors may become a key; online conspiracy theories can offer a sense of community; wellness and self-care may offer rituals that promise to transcend one’s body. Or the individual may encounter a spirit that casts these others into doubt, inspiring a sense that there is transcendence beyond our prescriptions.
And yes, it’s all a bit unclear at the end. Perhaps unsatisfying for some audiences. But perhaps that’s part of the point. Lowery’s film expresses the experience of modern existence with an insight and expansiveness that few other movies achieve. In this cinematic world, dance embodies the choreography of possession, exorcism becomes the means for reconciliation, and pop stardom offers the venue for fans to become disciples. The modern world is more porous than it realizes, but even those moments of spiritual presence are hazy and indirect, refracted through a prism of mystique. That mystique is precisely what makes Mother Mary so intriguing: there is a spiritual power in the world and it might be terrifying, but it also offers an opportunity to reconsider our understanding of the world.
While Mother Mary expresses the ways in which the spiritual haunts the buffered self, other movies highlight distinct facets of the search for transcendent meaning described by Taylor and Burton. David Lowery’s earlier film The Green Knight will provide the focus for the next article in this series. A classic Arthurian legend refracted through the prism of modern interpretation, The Green Knight crystallizes the clash between enchanted and secular worlds.
