Inverted Inquisitions: Some Thoughts on Martin Scorsese's Silence
During the few days between when I turned in my Fall semester
grades and began polishing my syllabi for the Spring I walked to my local
cinema for a matinée treat. I am actually lucky enough to live a few blocks
from a great little movie theatre –Teaneck Cinema- that offers a mix of big
Hollywood and more artsy films. I took advantage of their matinée discount on a
cold and overcast Tuesday and saw Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece, Silence. It was a strange form of
vacation escape- a film about torture, trials of faith, betrayal and love for a
silent God. Years of studying the Inquisition will mess with your sense of
“fun”!
The NYTimes Magazine did a great job giving the back story
to the making of Scorsese’s passion project: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/magazine/the-passion-of-martin-scorsese.html?_r=0
Scorsese first became interested in this
story about the persecution of Portuguese Jesuits and their humble peasant
converts after finishing his first great “religious” film, the controversial “Last
Temptation of Christ”. The difficulty of finishing and releasing that film
complicated Scorsese’s ability to sell this admittedly more obscure and
possibly darker project to Hollywood executives. It became a slow-burning
passion project for Scorsese that after 20 years he is able to bring to the
screen.
Silence is an adaptation of the novel by the Shusaku Endo and it is based on real events that transpired
in the 17th century. The Jesuits initially had great success with
sharing the Gospel in the far way islands of Japan beginning with Francis
Xavier in 1549. Japanese authorities eventually saw the missionizing as
integral to European designs at carving up Japanese territory and markets and
they initiated a brutal campaign against the Church. They targeted priests and
then turned to their followers. Our film begins with a scene of slow, aesthetically
searing torture of a priest. He is tied to a cross on the edge of hot springs
as the torturer drips the burning water on his chest. We watch this scene along
with the spiritually broken former priest Cristóvão Ferreira (fully inhabited
by Liam Neeson) who after renouncing his faith is forced to watch the martydom
of his fellow priests. Scorsese forces us to stay with this scene, to inhabit
the shoes of the failed priest Ferreira as he is forced to watch his
companions, many of whom were his students, suffer in ways that he could not.
Scorsese brings us inside the dark huts of the
crypto-Christians as they hear mass, confess their sins, baptize their children.
Scorsese lets us listen in as they clamor for promises of a better life in the
world to come, and we see the bafflement in the eyes of the young priest who
are ministering to them. These are sophisticated mystics, worldly, philosophically-minded zealots. For them this is a journey of the soul, it is about the
ineffable place where the divine fire burns, the scared, starved Japanese peasant’s
concerns are not their own. They have no babies who may not make it through the
winter; they are amazed at the peasants’ ability to suffer for their faith, to
suffer, to protect each other.
Eventually their hiding place is revealed by the same
Judas-like scoundrel whose wretchedness and contrition will continually beguile
the priests who can’t deny him the forgiveness he asks for, no matter how many
times he will betray them. Scorsese
gives us a seat as Rodrigues’ encounters with the Japanese Inquisitor, with his
sophistication, his arrogance and controlled rage. Is this an inverted mirror
of a certain image of the Catholic inquisitor, probing, urbane, ruthless? Is the
use of the term “inquisitor” anachronistic, off? Did the Japanese see their
persecution of the Christians as an inquisition? Were the Japanese aware of the
procedure of the Iberian inquisition? Were the cruelties of the Japanese
against their Christians an echo of the images of inquisitorial torture made
famous by the partisans of the “black legend” or was it a result of the
universality of intolerance and the madness that grips us when we feel we have
“God on our side” against a diabolical enemy?
The film engages, without resolving the big questions which
came to the fore with the first age of global expansion in the early modern
period—what does it mean to have a universal truth in such a diverse world? how
can the world and experience be captured truthfully when the world we are
seeing is so far from the world of our countrymen? Can truth be translated?
What is lost in translation? Can we understand the other without knowing their
language? Can there be encounter without conquest?
It was disorienting to see Christians on trial for their
beliefs- to see them tortured for their beliefs- the horror-fueled thrill that
the young Jesuits feel at seeing these poor peasants suffer like the primitive Church, praying in the dark like they did in the catacombs, to see their piety
put to the test as they are crucified and given sake instead of vinegar like Jesus
on the cross.
And then to see how the inquisitors figure out how to break
them --not through pain and suffering but by upending what it means to be a
Christian. They subvert their faith with the essence of the faith itself. The
priests are compelled to reject the faith in order to fulfill it- reject Jesus
in order to imitate him. They don’t torture the priest- they torture the flock
until the priest sacrifices his belief for them. What a cruel antinomian
impulse.
After the film I am also struck by the universal ability of
good, cultured men to enact tremendous cruelty in the name of a high ideal. In
this case the cause is about cultural purity and defense from foreign influence
and the inroads of colonialism- can you blame them? And yet, might there have
been another way?
To Rodrigues he sees the church as universal and not
connected to politics- the Japanese see that as laughable/naïve and extremely
dangerous.
Some thoughts on language:
The Jesuits speak with an accent- an indeterminate accent, the
contemporary Hollywood move to create a foreignness while keeping our handsome
stars speaking English- their faithful converts all use a little Portuguese when
they refer to a religious concept and they know some Latin prayers. The promise of the Church is expressed in a
supposedly universal language which is disconnected from political entanglements. Thus the power of the Latin mass invoked from
Poland to Spain to Mexico to the Philippines. But culture is not universal and
it is never divorced from political and soico-economic trends. Latin is after
all the classical language of Europe and bears no kinship to the rich cultural
legacies of the non-European world. It is a universal call but coded in western
hegemony. Can any cross-cultural encounter
be free and equal? Silence is also a study in what happens when we face the
other. It sketches the limits of our comprehension.
Silence captures
the complexity of the religious experience and shows what happens as the soul
is on trial, and it is stretched beyond itself. It also conjures a moment of
cultural confrontation- an encounter between East and West where suspicion,
appropriation and misunderstanding commingles with a desire to see the gifts
that the other brings from afar.
Silence received only one nomination at the Oscars this year. La-la-land
it is not! It is not an easy movie to watch but it is transporting and moving
and well worth the investment.
