Seeking the Transcendent and American Cinema

“To be a person is to be transcendent. We therefore know about the transcendent, God, only because we participate in that mode of being.” – David Walsh, The Priority of the Person

The observation of Lent brings into contrast the growing number of people who do not live a religious faith. How can people recognize divine presence in their day-to-day existence if the word “God” is unknown or avoided in their thinking and speaking? In the New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin argued that with the retreat of Christianity from the public square, people would be left stuck with only themselves in a type of restricted reality, often unable to differentiate or recognize, spiritual experience. Perhaps this suffering in a restricted reality is what brought Jesus to tears as he gazed over Jerusalem, lamenting for the people who were blind to the evocative Spirit that could bring peace.

The artists who make up the film industry are not necessarily sensitive to the broader themes of transcendence that are at the foundation of human life, but certainly many insightful filmmakers are sensitive to the power of human life, however humble, as it stands on its own. This attention to the human person, with all the struggles and triumphs that accompany any human pilgrimage through life, reveals for us the spiritual life in a unique form. By extension, the movies we watch can inform us of the breadth and depth of the human person, and the ways people in a post-Christian world experience transcendence. Two movies that challenge us to recognize transcendent experience in characters who exist on the periphery of American culture are The Florida Project and American Honey.

The Florida Project

The Florida Project introduces us to what is essentially a spiritless reality by telling the tale of Halley, a suffering character who is unable to recognize the transcendent, a character who may well be representative of a growing number of people in the West. Halley is a young woman living with a combination of pure, base animal instinct, and a fiercely entrenched sense of pride in her own dignity, even if she is not sure how to articulate that dignity. One challenge for the viewer of The Florida Project is to search out the spiritual quality of Halley’s life. This search is in some ways an attempt to redeem Halley’s character, to welcome her into the human community that finds its unity in a world transcendent Spirit.

Halley is a poor, unemployed woman in her twenties with a six-year-old daughter named Moonee. They live on the tourist strip near Disney World, in a motor inn called the Magic Castle, a motel complete with the facade of a castle and oodles of purple paint. Reviews of the movie often focus on Moonee and the power of her imagination to transcend her suffering condition. Childhood experience and imagination are important aspects of the movie, and make the viewer highly sensitive to the vulnerabilities of children living in poverty. It is also true that every six-year-old with time and friends will amuse themselves with all sorts of adventures, no matter where they live. Halley, on the other hand, is an American mother and ex-stripper alone without a husband or extended family. She is a resourceful woman, but she is also crude and capable of violence, existing on the periphery of cultural and political reality.

The Florida Project makes it abundantly clear that Halley lives in a cultural wasteland devoid of communal spirit. Religion, traditional art, culture, and civic ritual have lost out to a type of crass materialism made all the more cynical by the consumer culture on the tourist strip. The world that Halley is trying to navigate is one filled with facades and empty words, all with the end goal of selling trinkets and attention to tourists. In the motor inns along the strip lives a whole community of the poor and disenfranchised, including the unemployed, the nomadic underemployed, drug dealers, prostitutes, and pedophiles. Often they seem to wander about the motel grounds aimlessly, hobbled like Job and quick to curse. Unceasingly, in the background of Halley’s life, helicopters rise to the sky, taking tourists over Disney World, where the Disney Castle in all its splendor can be admired. The world of Disney and the strip is wonderfully constructed, as long as one stays in their vehicle.

Trying to understand the interior life of any human being is impossible, though we seek clues to such a life in people’s relationships, moral behavior, and spirituality, to name three markers. Throughout the film, the viewer is tempted to reduce Halley to a one-dimensional character. Does the world’s transcendent Spirit of mystery and beauty have any place in Halley’s life? Or, is she merely an instinctive creature, caring for her young like a black bear? In fact, Halley is something of a mystery. She is a suffering human being, but she transcends the suffering that keeps her pinned on the wall of exigent being. She may be crude, but she can share a laugh with the motel manager even as he busts her for late rent. She may be prone to violence, but she can walk hand in hand with a friend, or carry her tired daughter on her back. She may be defiant against all who criticize her or her daughter, but she can also converse intimately with those same people.

Concretely, life for Halley is akin to basic survival, and this is carried out by gritting one’s teeth and fighting against the indigence of poverty. Because Halley displays no awareness of a transcendent reality, or of having a spirituality, there is no abiding meaning in her experiences. Nothing is connected to anything else, so she has to remain rigidly rooted to Creation or else risk being washed away. Very little is sentimental with Halley and her daughter Moonee. For example, Halley never tells Moonee that she loves her. Instead, there is an aggressive enthusiasm or defiance empowering their relationship and their stance against the world. It is also clear that Halley will defend her daughter to the end, and that she adores her. In fact, Moonee is Halley’s primary source of transcendent experience. In a restaurant scene brimming with conflict, Halley gazes upon her daughter. One senses that Moonee is not only a delight to her but also an embodiment of hope and wonder. Who is this child? What depths of being flow beneath the surface of that child’s face? It is in these tender moments that Halley comes closest to being fully alive, most fully human.

Moonee brings Halley alive with her presence, allowing Halley to be a loving mother. One night Halley takes Moonee to a secluded spot off the strip where they watch the Disney fireworks from a distance. This is Halley’s birthday gift to Moonee. To protect Moonee, Halley often faces problems with creativity and hope, as when she sells wholesale perfumes to tourists. On the other hand, a combination of the television screen and the cell phone have contributed to an acedia that keeps Halley idle for countless hours in her motel room. It is also not clear whether she understands the disaster she is flirting with when she begins to prostitute herself to pay the rent. In a poignant moment, Halley and Moonee dance in the rain, delighted with nature’s gift and with each other’s presence. This scene represents a liminal moment in the lives of mother and daughter. Love experienced so intensely, even for only a moment, may be remembered for a lifetime and beyond.

Moonee’s play and explorations with friends usually take place with the suffocating tourist strip in the background. It is when Moonee escapes the strip that the cultural wasteland of our day is brought into better focus by its absence. One afternoon she takes a friend to a beautiful old tree where they perch themselves as they picnic. “Do you know why this is my favorite tree?” Moonee asks. “Because it tipped over and it’s still growing.” Certainly, it is a mistake to underestimate the power of nature to regenerate itself, and likewise, we would be in error to underestimate the potential of a lost soul to grow in depth and beauty. In another scene, Moonee and her friend watch cows quietly grazing. Beauty, and divine presence, is found in quiet moments, and in simplicity. We are reminded of an Edenic paradise, and how achingly close we live to such a reality. Finally, in a desperate moment of fear and despair, Moonee will run away and escape to Disney World. Here, on ground level, we observe Moonee run over the acres of concrete upon which the theme park rests, past milling families posing for pictures. Hoping to escape her suffering condition, Moonee is in search of the magic castle in a magic kingdom that can take away her anxieties, but the magic simply does not exist, despite its pervasive presence on our television screens. One hundred years ago, Moonee may have run into a church for sanctuary. Not only do Halley and Moonee not have a church to run into, they cannot even conceive of such a place ever existing. The transcendent spirit that can protect or even liberate a person from their suffering condition has been obliterated by an immanent experience that only allows a person to run away, stay and fight, or simply give up.

American Honey

The film American Honey flirts with similar themes to The Florida Project in telling the tale of a poor, young American woman named Star. The film opens with Star caring for two children and a dog who are not hers in an Oklahoma backwater neighborhood. She is also stuck in a dead-end relationship with an ungrateful drug user. Star is liberated from this minor hell by a traveling band of magazine salesmen composed of young people like herself. In a sense, the first symbol of transcendence in American Honey is the exuberance of youth culture in America where young people are not tied down to anything, with a robust disinterest in mortality or tradition. On the other hand, the transcendent freedom the young people intuit in American Honey is emboldened by a pack mentality. The peer pressure in this group can at times be stifling for the young seeker, and the viewer of the movie is not surprised to learn that drugs, alcohol, and sexual licentiousness are ever present in this subculture of road warriors. As the van load of young hedonists passes through middle America the temptation to compare American Honey to road stories like the movie Harry and Tonto, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, is unavoidable.

As a tip of the hat to Kerouac, the American highway can be understood as a symbol of transcendence. Books, movies, and songs make use of the American road to convey freedom, or pilgrimage, as is the case with Harry and Tonto. Recalling Voegelin’s concern for people without a religious tradition, the difficulty a character has without spirituality is that transcendent experiences are usually not differentiated or well-articulated. Like Halley in The Florida Project, the character of Star is often instinctive in her behavior. For example, the drugs, music, and conversation may lead to an upbeat atmosphere, and so Star is happy. But when Star finds herself alone, or hungover, then she is withdrawn and unsure. To compound matters, the road trip Star has embarked on has a disorienting quality to it because the trip has no end goal of a spiritual or geographical nature, so every day begins to look like the last. The road trip is also missing a communal spirit that could bind the characters with a deeper sense of brother and sisterhood. The dominating spirit that binds the characters is the search for transient pleasures, the work of selling magazines, and maybe of stealing whatever is not tied down. In contrast, Kerouac’s characters tend to be more conscious of the road and their flirting with a spiritual freedom that can never be fully grasped. Steinbeck’s characters in The Grapes of Wrath have God on the periphery of their experiences, whether they are praying to God or wrestling with him, and the Joad family absorbs suffering and death with a stoicism anchored in a tradition and virtue that is hard to find in American Honey.

This is not to minimize the comradery that Star experiences in the van of magazine salesmen, but the pressure to sell and to assert one’s identity as tough or carefree in a wolf pack-styled environment is not stable ground for a person trying to make their way into the good life. Like the tourist strip of Halley’s existence, in American Honey there is an oppressive atmosphere created by the transport van and Star’s perpetually stoned colleagues. There are moments of transcendent freedom, however, that offer Star an experience of participating in a world that has something mysterious and permanent resting behind the unstable and uncaring realm of material reality. One such experience is Star’s riding through a mid-Western city at night, sitting atop the transport van with her on again, off again lover. In cinema, as we see in well-known movies like Taxi Driver or Lost in Translation, city night scenes often bring characters to a sense of alienation or melancholy. In the city night, a solitary character faces a world of mystery and wonder, and sadness and reflectiveness grow as they realize they are standing alone in a world of constant movement. With her lover beside her, however, this night experience for Star strikes the viewer of the film as an affirmation of her being. She is experiencing a bittersweet, timeless mystery to her existence that can be shared with others, and it is a mystery that is beautiful and evocative.

Like Halley, Star has a firm sense of her own dignity, even if there are moments where she allows herself to be exposed to abuse or ridicule. Star also reveals to the viewer some of the tensions in American culture that have led to a new generation of post-Christian nomads and seekers. When visiting an upper-middle-class home in an upscale suburb, Star breaks up her partner’s sales pitch because of its self-deferential tone. The lady of the house is nervous of Star’s aggressiveness, suggesting that as a good Christian, she had tried to do the right thing by welcoming them inside. In response, Star points to the lady’s teenage daughter and her friends, gyrating by the pool to their favorite music. This may be a Christian home, Star suggests, but the devil has found a way in. Later, in a deeply impoverished neighborhood, Star will enter a home with two children abandoned by a drug-addicted parent. Star feels called to carry out an act of mercy, and goes grocery shopping for the kids, seeking to comfort them. This saintly action elevates Star above the chaos of the transport van and its inhabitants.

As Star’s road trip comes to a close, we see her separate herself once again from the sales group as they party on a riverbank. She releases a turtle into the river, a gift from her occasional lover, once again showing Star to be someone who is sensitive to life and to the vulnerable. Star then submerges herself in the river. This could be a type of baptism. The old life Star escaped in Oklahoma has been buried in the dark waters, and she is remerging as someone new, with a firmer sense of self that recognizes something good, mysterious, and timeless in her life. There is no suggestion that Star has a way out of her poverty, but she is looking to her friends partying on the shore as a woman with no particular need to be numbed by drugs or affirmed by others. Neither does Star need esoteric mysticism, astrology, political salvation, or a fantasy life. In the quiet of the river at dusk, she appears to dwell in the same silence as Elijah, acutely aware of herself in relation to what cannot be properly named.

In the spirit of David Walsh’s book, The Priority of the Person, every human being is a call to us, because every person has a transcendent, mysterious depth to them, a timeless story, beyond our comprehension. For all who read, study and pray, an important challenge in our post-Christian culture is to recognize transcendent experience in a person’s life. In the case of Star, her experience is obliquely expressed, but in her vision from the river, we can see Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree, realizing eternal peace to be tantalizingly near. Halley, on the other hand, lives in a frustratingly enclosed space, with what appears to be a non-existent spirituality. Yet when we see her dancing with Moonee in the rain, we can see Jesus laughing with friends at the wedding at Cana. And when we see her curse to the heavens as disaster falls, we see Jesus crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Halley is not a character who can articulate her timeless experience. It is for us to recognize the transcendent wonder of her character, and the transcendent wonder in all people who share a similar fate.

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