Finding Ourselves at the Movies: Philosophy for a New Generation

In the end we watch movies for many of the same reasons people have traditionally gone to church. Before there were movies coming from Hollywood, there were itinerant preachers who would bring the community together in revival meetings to hear the good news brought from afar. Indeed, the modern movie theater resembles a church—especially those large evangelical churches with enormous parking lots. Not surprisingly, there is a convergence of aspects of the “entertainment” industry across faith and film. Both combine text, image, and music in a spectacle. Today, we even have drive-in churches. Arguably, the calendar of the saints has been replaced by the calendar of the movie industry, from summer blockbusters to Oscar season. If we expand our view of film to include television, we find that media has organized the weekly calendar just as the church once did.

Technology has made the physical space in which we accomplish our collective imagining less important. This is true not just of film, in which much of our collective experience now occurs in what are called “home theaters,” but also of the practice of faith. The cable channels are full of evangelical preachers and even the Catholic Church has a regular broadcast. This is even more true of that third form of modern, collective imagining that has a place alongside church and theater: sports. Here, too, we find an organization of the calendar around our engagement with an organized spectacle; here, too, we move easily between the actual stadium and the televised viewing of the event. Indeed, at the modern stadium we are likely to find ourselves viewing a large screen projection of what is happening right in front of us.

It is a commonplace that sports competitions increasingly serve as a locus of sovereign identity. This is most evident at moments of international competition. The obscure Olympic sport that we only learn of once every four years, but suddenly embrace for the sake of our national team, stands in the place once held by the small war. The sustained competitions, particularly in soccer, stand in place of the endless wars of European balance of power politics. These national sports competitions trace their modern origins to the same sites and forums that produced national armies—both experienced the great democratization of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The importance of national identity in these sports competitions is assumed: we don’t often find citizens favoring some other nation’s team over their own. Here, citizenship continues to matter.

Church, sports, and cinema all have the odd character of the public-private. In our legal imagination they are squarely within the private order. In our social imagination, however, these are among the most public activities in which we engage. Together, they are largely constitutive of an American civil society. They are social practices outside of the domains of politics and markets—although all three are deeply connected with business and politics. If we take politics in its broadest sense as the construction of a community that expresses a set of values, that sustains a particular narrative of itself, and that reproduces itself over time, then all three are at the foundation of our political life. Each helps to shape the social imaginary; each passes on the set of values, the substantive narrative, and the historical project that is the community.

All three are deeply connected to each other as well: the sports drama always has about it an air of the religious ritual, as well as a faith in divine providence. There are, of course, endless iterations of the sports movie. We learn in such films of the emptiness of the self alone, of the need to sacrifice for the team, and of the success that will come with faith, even when confronted with what seems an impossible task. These are all virtues that we want to teach our children. They are not different from the political virtues for which they are not exactly placeholders but are rather further iterations. As with the political representation of these virtues, the sports drama is also likely to shade into the familial drama, for team and polity stand in a similar relationship to the familial order of love.

The intersection of family, sports, faith, and the political were all prominently on display in the film The Blind Side, which is about the transformation of an impoverished and abandoned black teenager into a successful football player.¹ Homeless, he is taken into a prominent, white, Christian family, whose love transforms his life from one of sadness and loss to fullness and care. Without love he can no more be a good football player than a good citizen. Success in sports depends on success in family, and this family is a site for the practice of Christian faith and charity. There simply is no line to be drawn between family and team, any more than between family and faith. Indeed, the teenager is a failure at football until his adopted mother tells him to protect the other members of the team as if they were part of his family. All of these elements are set alongside a political message of racial harmony within a larger collective identity. Collegiate football at Old Miss becomes the center of an intergenerational, familial-political community that overcomes difference through love.²

It is often noted that the rest of the world forms an image of America through the films that we export. It is less often noted that this is true internally as well: we know ourselves through films. For many, the normative center of civil society is no longer church but film. For our adolescents and young adults, films are taking on the critical role of forming the social imaginary. Going to the movies is an extended rite of passage. The teenagers gathering in the lobby of the multiplex on Friday nights are the distant progeny of those earlier Americans who would gather together as a community once a week at the local church. Even for adults, watching a movie is often a way of renewing contact with the fundamental narrative structures—the archetypes—of the social imaginary. These structures are on full display in a film like The Blind Side, which ties together familial love, faith, and politics. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that while some of the violence of a sacrificial politics has been displaced onto the violence of football, the story of love and sacrifice remains what it has always been.

Both cinema and church require trust, for both require that we suspend disbelief. Doing so, we expose ourselves to the possibility of a dangerous disorder. In both settings we give up control. We are literally in someone else’s hands. Ordinary roles no longer count. This suspension of the self is a great equalizer: we are all equal before God and screen. Neither God nor screen is bound by the laws of causality and the discoveries of science. A world of causal explanations is displaced by a world of moral narrative.

There are recurrent millennial movements that explode within communities of faith, just as there are revolutionary moments in politics. But most of the time, and for most people, the point of religion is not to destroy the ordinary but to ground it. Religious narrative offers a way of imagining the self and the community that connects to the sacred. The task is to connect the extraordinary and the ordinary, the sacred and the profane, ultimate meaning to normal affairs. What appears as the sacred and the profane to faith appears as sovereignty and law in politics. In our personal lives this distinction appears as identity and role. In each domain we face a similar problem of legitimacy: to ground the ordinary in the extraordinary. We must see through the multiple representations of the self to the truth of identity; we must see through law to sovereignty, and we must see through the profane to the sacred. This is the work of narrative, from the great myths of origins, to the national myth of the founding, to personal narratives of finding the self in and through love.

The trust that one puts in the church is the trust that the message will respect the narrative conventions. Faith is betrayed if the conventions are breached. The same is true of film.³ In the last two chapters I argued that the conventions are aided by normalizing forms of anxiety. Even the church had a doctrine of sin; it had also to offer a theodicy. We might think of horror and porn, for example, as normalized expressions of anxiety. They rely on problematizing the relationship of representation to identity, which structures the dominant narrative form.

Of course, any particular film can set itself deliberately in opposition to the expected archetypal forms. It can do so to make the point that these are conventions that could be otherwise. Doing so, the film does not escape the paradigms; rather, it forces them on our attention. The Hurt Locker, which I discussed in chapter 2, is a good example of a film that deliberately violates our expectations about the social function of the soldier’s heroism in order to make us confront those conventions. The same is true of Greenberg, a film about a forty-year-old man, recently released from a mental institution, who is house-sitting in Los Angeles for his wealthy brother.⁴ The film is a romantic comedy that is neither very romantic nor very comic—just the point. Greenberg and Florence, the omnicompetent personal assistant to the brother’s family, come close to falling in love. We expect them to, but they do not. He remains narcissistic, alienating, and unpleasant. There is no recovery of a true self in and through love. Instead of an authentic self, we see glimpses of a prior self—a failed rock musician. Nothing about him seems any more true than anything else. He is a problem to himself, but then so is she. She remains a rather confused twenty-something who has no idea of where she will end up or what she should do. Neither changes as a result of their encounter. They do not live “happily ever after.” We are forced to wonder what the movie is about. Its narrative is, most importantly, an absence, which is the failure of the romantic comedy that we expect.

Ordinarily, a film, like a sermon, contains a moral lesson by virtue of its resolution of the problem around which its narrative is organized. We trust that the resolution will not be arbitrary, capricious, or wrong. This does not mean that endings must always be happy. Love, I have argued throughout, can lead to pain, as well as happiness. The trust we put in the film is not a naive expectation of happiness. Rather, we trust that we will come to see a morally ordered world. Greenberg and The Hurt Locker are deliberately frustrating because they don’t show us the meaningful resolution we expect. Along the same lines, some horror films make a convention out of deliberately frustrating the end; they leave open the possibility of return of the seemingly defeated monster.⁵

In film it is not enough to see evil defeated by a random accident. History may be determined by accidental causes: a change in the weather, a navigational disaster, a chance meeting. Any particular person can be struck down by disease or by a speeding car. A film, however, is about reasons, not causes.⁶ We trust the reasons to carry the plot and to move the characters. There are to be no “acts of God,” except by a knowing god. What this god knows is what we know. A film depends, we might say, on “good fortune” but not on mere chance.⁷ The world that operates in the film is one in which causes and reasons have already been aligned. Nature always cooperates; the trains always run on time. Or, when they don’t, that, too, must be a matter of good fortune. There must be a reason.

No one should confuse the representations in popular films with history or reporting. Nor should these representations be confused with “honest” psychological evaluations. This would be like believing we can learn history from Bible stories. Films may be based on historical events or actual people, but they are not offering history or biography. They are doing what drama has always done: offering a moral narrative. They establish order by offering a discrete story with beginning, middle, and end. That structure is the necessary condition of a moral narrative: there must be a problem, and it is to be resolved. We learn from film how to imagine our world, for we are all constantly constructing narratives of our lives and of the communities in which we find ourselves. If we cannot, we are quite literally lost. We will not know what to do or how to think about ourselves. An explanation of causes will not tell us what to do or what to make of our past and future. As moral agents, we need reasons; to have reasons, we must have a narrative.

Films offer training in the constructive function of the social imaginary. We exercise our imaginations by trusting to the narrative construction that is the film. We are drawn in, but we are never left to our own devices. We put ourselves in the world that the film creates. We attend to the characters. There are certain questions we can ask, others we cannot. As long as we are attending to the film, we don’t think of it as a financial venture. We don’t think of it as a technological achievement. All of this can be said of the practice of religious faith as well. It, too, is a form of training in imaginative construction. We put ourselves in the world that faith creates and religious narrative sustains. Finally, the same can be said of political beliefs: political rhetoric is the construction of the moral narrative of the community. This is just the point: the social imaginary is working across all these fields of experience; it is working in similar ways and forms.

The trust extended upon entering the church is answered by the promise of a redemptive grace. We trust the church, and it responds with a narrative of rebirth. The same is true of film. The trust we extend to film is met by a similar narrative: no longer faith in God’s grace but in the power of love. Through love we will be born again.

Faith is the internal experience of narrative completeness. Traditionally, God was the simplest expression of this need for narrative. Faith in God was faith in the power of an author to script a narrative that is whole and complete. People believe in God because they must believe that our lives have a meaning, that something more is at stake in our lives than causes in a material world. Faith moves from causes to reasons, from laws of behavior to free actions. Reasons are sources of persuasion to a free subject. Thus, the Old Testament shows us the patriarchs arguing with God. Why not? God is a free subject who must, therefore, be open to persuasion. Sometimes they do persuade Him.

If we believe that the world operates according to reasons, we easily imagine that they must be reasons for an agent, that is, for someone capable of acting in response to these reasons. That would be God. Faith, however, is not in need of a personal god. It is in need of narrative: a narrative is always the story of a free subject or subjects acting according to reasons. Thus, our own lives are informed by faith when we believe that we are free subjects acting for reasons that constitute the narrative arc of our lives. The same is true of the nation as a historical subject capable of acting for reasons: that nation only exists as the object of the imagination, and it will continue to exist only as long as we sustain a faith in it—no longer faith in God but faith in the popular sovereign. Here, too, we find a free subject capable of acting for reasons.

One of the deepest lessons that our contemporary evangelical atheists refuse to learn is that the choice for God is never the conclusion of an argument. It is not a subject of proof. Most important, it is not defeated by a counterproof. There is no logic to the sacred. There is only faith and the failure of faith. Without faith we will not lack for explanations of experience: science investigates the causes of our actions and beliefs. Causes, however, are not reasons. The law of gravity is not a reason for, but a cause of, movement. It is true or false; it is not to be given weight as an element of a persuasive argument. It is, rather, to be discovered in its actual operation. An explanation that refers to causes operates without any moment of decision and thus without any regard for freedom. When we act for a reason, we have been persuaded. A reason is, in this sense, always the product of an argument—although not necessarily of a demonstration. Accordingly, reasons always have reasons: they are embedded in arguments.

We can no more understand the relationship between causes and reasons, body and soul, than could Kant. We cross the divide between the two of them through an act of faith. In the absence of faith we stand before a thought that is simply unacceptable: that there is nothing but causes, which simply recede into an infinite past and continue into an indefinite future. We appear and we disappear in the endless chain of causes. Human history, including each of us, is nothing more than a set of points in this chain of events. No one can actually think this thought without experiencing a kind of existential revulsion. People cannot be indifferent to those they love or to their own life as a project that has value, nor can they think that they lack free agency. Everyone believes that there are choices to be made and that his or her life constitutes the narrative in which those choices make sense—or fail to make sense. As long as causes alone govern the world, there is only darkness over the deep. The world begins with a free act of narrative: a performative utterance. Our beginning is in the word. There we find the origin of faith. As I have argued throughout, faith moves us from representation to identity. Identity, whether of self or nation, is always a matter of ultimate value.

Faith is not, as some Enlightenment figures thought, a failure of freedom.⁸ It is, rather, the condition of freedom. Without faith we would be bound by causes. To think that science will eliminate faith is like thinking that nonfiction will defeat fiction. The products of the social imaginary are all fictions; they do not show up in a scientific account. But these fictions are matters for which we live and die. We have no other world than that which we imagine. We cannot choose to live in the world of causes revealed in the laboratory. At the end of the day we go home to family, friends, and community. We leave the lab and find ourselves living within multiple narratives. We go to the movies. There even the scientist suspends disbelief.

For the Christian imagination, faith is met by grace. Identity is constituted not by the free choice alone but by the union of that free act with the sacred. One does not save oneself but comes to grace through the free act of confession. This is one way of affirming an experience of ultimate meaning that is not merely subjective. Grace comes from without. We affirm the world at the same time that we affirm ourselves. When I speak of love, sovereignty, or identity, I am always pointing to an experience of ultimate meaning of the world. These are the contemporary forms of grace. From these sources we build contemporary narratives of a free subject acting in a world of transcendent value. Here we find the grounds of a sacrifice that creates and sustains a world.

While the idea of grace may no longer be useful for many people, I have tried to show throughout this book that love has stepped into its place. If we think of film as the modern counterpart to the sermon, then, across various genres films offer endless sermons on love. Love, too, requires faith; and love, too, affirms the freedom of the subject. The pattern of confession met by grace remains. Strip away all roles, propositions, and judgments—the moment of confession—and we find the comfort of an inexplicable, because uncaused, love. We must free ourselves of the ordinary; we must turn to the exceptional space of identity, for there alone will we be met by love. Love always has an element of “at first sight” because it has no cause. Just as with grace, it comes as if from nowhere. What else would we expect from a Judeo-Christian culture that has entrusted the social imaginary to the cinema?

Each of the last two chapters took up one of the two dominant themes of our social imaginary. Chapter 4 looked at films through the Old Testament idea of sacrifice; chapter 5 looked at film through the New Testament idea of rebirth. Isaac and Jesus are the deep figures at work here. The story of Isaac is that of sacrifice founding nationhood; that of Jesus is the familial drama of innocence and rebirth. Of course, these stories merge at multiple points, which is exactly what we saw in film as well. We cannot easily separate the imagination of politics from that of family—although the reverse proposition is not true. We can imagine the innocence of family apart from the political. This is just another way of saying that we can imagine ourselves without politics but not without family.

There are deeply conservative religious groups in this country that fear film as a force that would contaminate their children with the germ of secular humanism. Whether films are capable of undermining their fundamentalism, I don’t know. It is, however, certainly a mistake to think that films are out of line with the deeply Judeo-Christian nature of our social imaginary. The narratives we find in film are the contemporary forms of the same narratives that have sustained the West for millennia. We find family and state, love and sacrifice, innocence and renewal. We find the call to faith as a call to identity over representation. Of course, we also find films expressing anxiety with respect to these narratives, but doubt is hardly a modern invention. The roots of the social imaginary are as deep as the West itself.

I want to conclude by speaking of Avatar, the most financially successful movie ever. It tells us a good deal about the operation of faith in film. The scene is a planet light years away. The planet possesses a mineral with unique properties that make it enormously valuable back on Earth. The planet is home, however, to a hominoid-like species. They form communities rich in traditions, including religion. Their world is full of natural—and spiritual—wonders with which they live in deep respect and harmony. This is the setting for a contemporary retelling of what is essentially the story of European exploitation of the New World. It is not about gold or Native Americans, but it is the same story of a crossing of political power and economic exploitation, of a turn to brute force in support of crass economic ends, of a willingness to commit genocide, and of the careless destruction of a marvelous nature and ancient tradition. When the natives won’t cooperate, they are to be destroyed. Resistance, they are to be made to believe, is useless.

One interesting difference with the earlier story of colonial exploitation is that science has now taken the place of the church. The Spanish colonial apparatus of exploitation had the ideological cover of a religious mission to convert the savages. The church legitimated the colonizers. One of the ways in which it did this was by expressing concern for the indigenous peoples. Different priests and missionaries took different positions along a continuum that extended from justifying slavery to seeing the natives as innocent and thus closer to God than the Europeans. At the extreme some missionaries reversed the colonial order, believing that the Europeans were evil and should learn the ways of true faith from the indigenous peoples.⁹ The New World, in this view, could save the Europeans from the sins of the Old. Needless to say, this was not the prevailing view.

In Avatar there is no formal religious presence among the humans: only force, economics, technology, and science. Money and technology have created a kind of political order, although it seems to be a privatized order run by corporate interests. The armed forces appear to be largely ex-military personnel, who are now operating as private contractors. There is a hierarchy of leadership that wields the instrumentalities of coercive force. Like every government, it is striving for a monopoly on legitimate coercion. In place of priests, however, there are now scientists. Just as the pope once legitimized the colonial efforts of the Spanish and Portuguese in the name of spreading Christianity to those who would otherwise be lost to sin, the relationship of exploitation and care is replicated by the scientists of the future. The whole of the mining and colonial enterprise requires an unimaginably sophisticated science. Technical knowledge has replaced religious knowledge as the ground of power. Yet the scientists we see are trying to extend to the indigenous the benefits of their knowledge. They are writing books and building schools, while the mining company is killing and destroying. We again have the threat of genocide coupled with an ethics of concern.

The scientists are not just technological enablers but also instruments of legitimation precisely because they care for the natives. The corporate interests understand that peaceful exploitation is easier and cheaper than genocidal destruction. But if the scientists cannot accomplish the former, the soldiers will accomplish the latter. The clock is ticking as the movie begins, for some sort of low-scale war is already being waged between the corporation and the natives. Unable to pacify the natives, the scientists are, for the most part, peripheral to the conflict. They are ignored by the company interests: they are suspected by the indigenous people.

The scientists turn out to be no better at protecting the native population than the priests were in the Americas. Like the church, the scientists unleash forces that they do not control. Indeed, they cannot even save themselves when they stand in opposition to the ends of exploitation. They cannot save themselves because they are caught in between: they reject the corporate ethos of exploitation, but they do not really identify with the natives. The indigenous communities are their objects of study; the scientists want to help them, not become them. Like the church in the Americas, the scientists recognize a hierarchy of knowledge and civilization. They are on a “mission.” This idea is perfectly expressed in the avatar that the scientist occupies: it has the body of the indigenous but the mind (soul) of the scientist. It allows the scientist to be an observer but does not allow him to “go native”—the great fear on any frontier.¹⁰

In the Americas the indigenous peoples had nothing with which to defend against steel and powder, let alone against disease and alcohol. In Avatar they are shooting arrows at massive machines of destruction. They can dream of freedom, of a return to a preinvasion time, but they are primitives fighting an advanced technology. Avatar replicates this sorry history in what we might call a form of neo-neocolonialism. The patterns are all the same, along with the assumption that the indigenous cannot save themselves. They do not have the power to defeat the invader absent the leadership of the foreigner turned native. They must be saved not just by an outsider but by one who betrays his own people. Of course, it is only love that can cross this divide—not the love of God that the missionaries had but the love by which two people become one. The heroic transformation is a giving up of one world for another: that giving up and taking on is the action of sacrifice for love.

The structure of Avatar’s narrative is entirely ordinary: not politics, economics, science, or violence, but love is the foundation on which the world must rest. The striking feature of the movie is not the story but the visual effects of the distant planet and the creative device used to transit from one world to another: the avatar. It is made from the crossing of the DNA of a human and of a native from the planet. This makes the avatar capable of living on the planet without the technical assistance ordinarily needed by humans. It is, however, body without mind. The avatar is only complete—body and soul—when it is “occupied” by the mind of the person from whose DNA it arose. That “mind link” is accomplished through entering what looks like a high-tech casket. To enter the avatar is to enter a sort of dreamworld of wonders, of incredible beauty, and ultimately of a kind of intelligence. The scientist ordinarily awakes, however, back inside the protected space of the colony.

Despite the avatars the scientists have not been successful, for what they offer is not needed in this world. They are needed only by the exploiters. Things change only when an ordinary person—a paraplegic veteran—finds himself, by virtue of the accidental death of his scientist twin brother, cast into the role of avatar. Without the burdens of science, and without the interests of corporate gain, he is innocent. Immediately, he falls in love with the daughter of the native leader. He “goes native.” The story is as old as our own endless reworking of the story of Pocahontas. Together, they create their own army, which defeats the corporation. The film ends with its own story of death and rebirth as he becomes permanently the avatar he previously could only occupy with the help of the machine. He is freed of his broken body and born again, made whole through love.¹¹

This beautiful planet of strange and wondrous creatures offers more than a replication of colonial affairs. It is an image of the world created by film. The process of entering the high tech casket parallels the process of entering the theater: we are reborn into the spectacular world of the film. We, too, must enter a closed box; we, too, must work the “mind link” that puts us in the world of the film; we, too, rely on a technology that we don’t understand; and we, too, trust that it will only be temporary. We, like the occupants of the avatars, must give up our limited, broken bodies of this world and come into the truth and beauty of the film world. We must trust those who create the film, just as they must trust the technicians of the avatar. The question for us, as it is in the film, is whether we enter as scientist-observers or as potential converts open to rebirth.

In the film Sully, the veteran turned avatar, must decide where his identity lies: is he the paraplegic in the box or the avatar in this new world? Science and technology will not answer this question for him. They make it possible for him to move back and forth between worlds, but which world has the better claim? The film answers that love is the foundation of the world. Where we are claimed by love, we find the truth of the self. He must die to live. This resurrection requires faith that through love he will be saved. The two-become-one of the avatar—a technological achievement—must be transcended by the two-become-one of love. The avatar had always been a kind of projected image—a representation—of the self. Love moves from representation to identity. Love makes us whole.

Dying to one world and being reborn in another is the archetype of Christian faith. Christ says, “He who believes in me shall never die.” For us the power of these words has shifted to love. Love, no less than grace, requires faith. Sully takes the step to rebirth only through a leap of faith: he cannot be sure if the result will be death or renewal. This is the fundamental message of countless films: we must have faith that love will save us. Through faith there will be rebirth in a marvelous world—the world that love creates. This is a world that is infused with an ultimate meaning that is not captured by technology and that lies beyond economics, politics, or interests.

In working this theme the director James Cameron is returning directly to the themes of Titanic—his film of a decade earlier that had previously been the all-time leader in gross revenue.¹² There, the themes of technology, corporate imperialism, love, and identity were played out across a difference of class rather than species. There, the gender roles were reversed: the woman had to cross classes, while the man taught the lesson of the simpler virtues of love. He sacrifices himself for her as the ship goes down, but she is reborn into this world founded on love. She leads the life he opened for her, giving up forever her previous class position. There, too, Cameron uses a framing device that draws our attention to the experience of film as film. The story of love on the Titanic is told by the woman at its center. She is now an old woman narrating the story to a group of scientists exploring the wreckage of the ship. They must trust her, just as we must trust the film.

A faith founded in love, not grace, shifts our attention from theodicy to contingency. The Christian faithful unavoidably confronted the question of why God allowed suffering into his creation. Could we sustain faith in the face of that suffering?¹³ Today it is not suffering but contingency that threatens to undermine the possibility of meaningful narrative. In a world set free of God, contingency threatens to invade every dimension of our lives, beginning with the question of how we got here and ending with that of where we are going. The answer to the first question seems to be “by chance” and to the second, “nowhere.” Can we have faith under these postmodern conditions of disbelief?

A world created by God may be a mystery, but it is not contingent. It may stand under the threat of destruction, but whether it survives or not is posed as a moral issue: does humanity deserve to survive? Today, when we speak of contingency, we mean just the opposite: what happens is a matter of moral indifference. There is no plan, no progress, no judgment. The only explanation for where we are is chance; the only thing we know with certainty about the future is that it is wholly indifferent to human reasons, cares, and hopes. Like the dinosaurs, we are at the mercy of chance events.

The normative crisis of contingency is a product of a scientific attitude that equates causal explanation with understanding. A contingent event is not uncaused; rather, it happens without regard to reasons. When we describe something as contingent, we are acknowledging that it is the product of causes too numerous to ground an account, too diffuse for prediction, and too obscure to control for the sake of our own narratives. We simply don’t know what will happen because too much is happening at once. The more we learn of causes, the smaller the domain of contingency. Contingency marks the boundaries of our grasp of causes. An example is predicting the weather. There was a time when it seemed a matter of contingency whether it rained or not. As we get better at predicting the weather, it seems more a matter of cause than chance. Yet weather predictions still come with probabilities attached.

That contingency and necessity are bound together was precisely the threat to the religious imagination represented by Darwin. The evolution of species is simultaneously wholly determined by natural causes and wholly contingent. That humans exist is a purely contingent matter, having nothing to do with creation in the image of God. How we came to be is a problem for science. It will be answered by tracing a series of causal links at multiple levels, from the cellular to the environmental. This relationship of contingency to necessity is true of any accident: the car crash is entirely contingent and entirely caused.

An entirely determined world and an entirely contingent world come to the same thing from the perspective of human action. A human world is one that rests on narrative, and narrative cannot operate in a world determined by causes. Contingency and causality, accordingly, represent the same threat to the imagination. In neither can the free subject take responsibility for his or her actions; in neither can he or she imagine being claimed by an ultimate meaning. In neither can we distinguish between representation and identity.

In philosophy the problem of morality has long been linked to the problem of causality: how can we be free actors making morally significant choices if we are fully determined in our behavior? Posing the problem, instead, as one of contingency shifts the felt threat from the moral to the erotic imagination: How can I think of myself as finding an ultimate meaning in and through love, when the object of my love appears to be entirely contingent? We fall in love with those whom we happen to meet, and those meetings are the product of random events or of actions taken for completely different purposes. Can we recognize contingency and find ultimate meaning in the same events?

Just as causal determinism is met by the moral imagination, contingency is met by the aesthetic imagination, which today includes film. In films questions of free will and moral choice tend to be linked to the dominant theme of responding to the problem of contingency through love.¹⁴ The most recent of the Terminator series, Terminator Salvation, shows us this movement from the moral problem to the erotic problem, from free will to sacrifice.

Like its predecessors in the series, this film continues the war between machines and persons. The new character introduced here is not the machine that protects humans—as in Terminator 2—but a character who thinks he is human but is actually a combination of the human and the machine. He, too, is a kind of avatar. How he got that way matters less than the fact that his course of action, which is seemingly taken to protect the beleaguered human community, has actually been programmed—that is, it is a function of causes, not reasons. The program’s real purpose is to trap those whom he thinks he is aiding. What appear to be free choices have actually been aspects of an elaborate deception, not by him but by those who “made” him. If he does not know what he is “really” doing, do any of us? That would be the moral message—free will is an illusion—but the film cannot stop there. Instead, it has to move from the moral to the erotic. He proves himself free—and thus human—by sacrificing himself for the thoroughly human leader. He gives up his human heart in a transplant operation to save the suffering leader. Here love defeats necessity and contingency. His resurrection is complete only at the moment of sacrifice. Through that death he gains the truth of himself. Thus, love founds identity. Faith is an entirely human quality that cannot be programmed, for it rests on reasons, not causes.

In film we see the natural giving way to the erotic imagination—or, more precisely, to the romantic imagination. Usually, this is not linked to a failure of the moral imagination. Rather, it is tied directly to the problem of contingency. When the contingent appears necessary in the human world of reasons, we speak of “fate.” Oedipus presents this transformation as tragedy: the chance encounter with his unknown father on the road was Oedipus’s fate; it was constitutive of his identity. For us this transformation of chance into fate is more likely to produce comedy. This, too, has an ancient root: Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium.

Aristophanes tells us that long ago people were circular, possessing a double complement of all the body parts they have now. All were complete in themselves. In that state of autonomous self-fulfillment they challenged the gods. In response to their hubris the gods split them in two, leaving each person desperately searching for his or her other half. Thus, we are each of us only half of a whole. We long to find our other half. If and when we do, we say we are in love. Love is that state in which we want only to be joined with the beloved forever and so return to that state of completeness that is the two-become-one. In this state of identity we have no needs and speak no words. We can forgo entirely the world constructed in and through representation. Lovers need no one else. They have no regard for roles because they have found their true identity. Their lives look to others like a kind of death, for they have died to their former, incomplete selves and been reborn in and through each other.

Aristophanes’s myth captures the existential loneliness of the individual, on the one hand, and the world-creating power of love, on the other. Looking back across the millennia, we can see in it the movement from contingency to necessity. Memory—we remember our prior state of wholeness—is a metaphor for an existential necessity. Thus, the myth tells us that our other half exists. She or he is out there to be found in just the same way that I am here. We are two halves of what was a whole, and our loneliness is a longing for the other. Thus, love converts the apparently contingent—a chance meeting—into the deepest necessity. The story we tell of “falling in love” always carries this burden of converting contingency into necessity. We must have the faith that our other half exists, if we are even to imagine the possibility of love. Absent that faith, we may form relationships, but we will not found the new world of the two-become-one.

Aristophanes’s myth may be the earliest expression of the archetype of the necessity of love that we discover in countless films. Love is not a matter of beauty, wealth, or power. It is not the conclusion of an argument or a lesson learned. In film love seizes the characters as a result of utterly contingent events. In Titanic Jack wins a ticket for the Atlantic passage in a game of cards; in Avatar Jake Sully takes on the role of avatar after his brother’s accidental death. In neither case was there any planning. In neither case was the object of their love waiting for them. Rather, they were living their own lives, with their own plans. The meeting is always by chance. We cannot choose love. We must have faith that love will find us and that once found, we will be reborn. We are possessed as if by grace.

Contingency become existential necessity is the lesson of the movies. The world that films show us is one in which the two halves of Aristophanes’s circle-people find each other. This is the reward of our trust in film, but it is also the formation of the social imaginary that we take with us as we leave the theater. In a contingent world we must have faith in love. Kant asks, after his inquiries into what we can know and what we must do, “For what can we hope?” Our answer is that we can hope for love.

Theaters are not centers of didactic indoctrination. They are rather dreamworlds of narrative. We put our trust in the movies, and we trust our children to the movies. Doing so, we see and hear repeated once again that which we must believe. Avatar and Titanic were both directed at a young audience, although both were deeply attractive to that audience’s parents as well. As long as we trust ourselves to film, our faith will be met by love. Contingency is banished; reasons replace causes; and narrative organizes our world.