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The Book Haven: Cynthia Haven's Blog for the Written Word
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The Book Haven
Over the last few years, I’ve come to serve as a sort of electronic butler for René Girard. Other journalists, readers, and fans often email me if they want to reach the reclusive octogenarian. I am happy to assume the role; I consider myself a friend as well as an occasional interlocutor. A few weeks ago, however, the ad hoc role offered an unusual bonus: I received an email from Italian director Guido Chiesa, who has just completed Io Sono Con Te, featured a few months ago at the Rome Film Festival and covered in Espresso, L’Osservatore Romano, and the Italian editions of Rolling Stone and GQ. It was filmed in Tunisia with mostly local, and often non-professional, performers.

“René Girard‘s work was a great source of inspiration for our project and it helped us a great deal during the writing of the script and the understanding of several Biblical passages about Mary and Jesus’s childhood,” he wrote. So he sent a DVD and press kit to me, as well as René.

Chiesa’s results are interesting, to say the least. He retells the Nativity and childhood of Jesus from a Girardian p.o.v.

Chiesa’s film confronts us with an archaic world of pervasive, quotidian violence – the contemptuous violence of Roman occupation; the temples soaked in blood and sacrifice; the slaughter of helpless animals. Even Joseph is dominated by a fictitious (but altogether plausible) older brother, the head of the clan who is quick with his hands and his temper.

“Why do you have to take it out on someone?” one woman asks. “Why is a scapegoat necessary, why do we need an outlet for aggression and blame?” is the unasked question. The mob, as always, is ruled by fear, conformity, vengeance, and the need to blame.

René writes about the terrible tendency to target an alien, an outsider, the oddball. Hence, Mary is seen as a skandalon, as René would say.

Chiesa’s Mary is exceptional. He has cast a very young Tunisian girl, speaking a Tunisian dialect, for most of the 100+ minute film; there’s nothing ethereal or otherworldly (or even conventionally beautiful) about her: she’s round-faced and solid as a fire plug, simple and clear as water. When her cousin Elizabeth frets over the complexity and bloodiness of Mosaic law, Mary tells her unaffectedly that what is needed is “not sacrifice, but mercy.” It’s a persuasive message.

And perhaps it’s a message that has won: René contends that, from these archaic societies to the Christian era, the word “sacrifice” changed. When used in the archaic world, it always meant the sacrifice of another – a human or animal sacrifice. Now, “sacrifice” always suggests a sacrifice of oneself, of doing without something.

‎We noted the anniversary of Eric Voegelin’s death yesterday, so that’s an excuse for a relevant quote: “Christ is the head of the corpus mysticum, which includes all men from the beginning of the world to its end. He is not the president of a special-interest club.” Which would mean, of course, that there are no outsiders, outcasts, aliens, or oddballs. This is of course, the implications of the Girardian theory. It’s not a conclusion anyone comes to quickly.

The characters in the film, as people everywhere, are figuring this out as time rolls forward – hence, the scene with the tentful of confused “wise men” (not the iconic three). “Loving your neighbor” finally extended outside the tribe, at least in theory if not practice, through the centuries.

The next day I got a full belly of archaic societies again, New World style, with the Olmec exhibition at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.

These dauntingly huge statues were made for one apparent purpose: to impress and intimidate. When the rulers were toppled, their colossal heads were defaced, and that was that. The exhibition even featured a massive, heavily decorated “butcher box” for blood and human parts in sacrifice rituals.

It reminded me again of Chiesa’s haunting film, depicting a society dominated by those who seek power for its own sake, a world where power is all – just before that hierarchy was to be turned upside down, not all at once, and not even today, but poco a poco – by an execution where (since it is W.H. Auden’s birthday today, and since his words were rolling through my head in the museum):

.

… three pale figures were led forth and bound

To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came …

The powerless will always be alone.