The Line in the Sand

In his acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Director earlier this week, Guillermo del Toro said, 'I think the greatest thing that our industry does is erase the line in the sand. We should continue doing that, when the world tells us to make it deeper.' The Mexican-born director was speaking in the context of immigration and President Donald Trump's effort to build a wall between the US and Mexico to effect greater controls over illegal immigration. However, he was speaking with regard to the movie he had directed and for which he won the Oscar, The Shape of Water. That movie is also about abolishing lines in the sand, but in a very different context. 

The Shape of Water is about a lonely mute woman who falls in love with a captured sea creature which she helps escape from a top secret government facility where it is being tortured and doomed to be killed to enable experimentation. Described as a 'romantic fantasy' the movie reaches its central moment when the woman and the creature have sex. Hollywood and the critics have fallen in love with the movie and it is being proposed as 'a battle cry for inclusion and female empowerment' as The Guardian put it.  The movie, while hailed for its innovation, may not be as original or groundbreaking as we might be led to expect. At the moment del Toro is facing legal action for alleged plagiarism - it seems the story is not original at all, two other movies feature an uncannily similar story. 

Establishment piece

The movie is a typical establishment piece where conservatives are branded as bad and libertines as poor outcasts who are goodness itself. The goodies are the mute lady, who is presented in a light of extraordinary innocence; an African-American woman enduring a heartless marriage to a lazy husband; and a lonely, love-starved elderly gay artist whose career has fossilised. The baddies are a Colonel who is torturing the creature and who holds the usual opinions about life, marriage and God and who makes unsolicited advances to the main character; and then some Soviet spies, obvious stock characters. There is also another stock character, a young man working in a pie shop for whom the elderly gay artist nurtures a passion. When the gay man makes a pass at the young man (who looks startlingly Aryan), he is rebuked with violence and personal abuse as the young man, who now reveals he is as much racist as he is 'homophobic', proceeds to throw a black couple out of the shop. Time frame? Early Sixties, during the Cold War before the 'Summer of Love'. It's all too easy.

As the title suggests, the movie features a lot of water since this is the habitat the creature inhabits and needs to survive. Given that it is called The Shape of Water we are to presume that, as water has no shape and is free to flow, then love too must be allowed to flow without being hindered. So bestiality is celebrated as liberating, as indeed is pederasty in another of Hollywood's favourite movies this year, Call Me By Your Name which presents an adult man's preying on a teenage boy in the most positive light possible. But water can indeed assume a shape: it can take the shape of the vessel it is poured into, and so perhaps the message is: love can take any shape and therefore it must be respected whatever form it takes. We are to draw the conclusion, I presume, that morality too takes a variety of shapes: there is no objective morality. It can be poured into vessels of different sizes and shapes and it is all wonderful. And then we are free; empowered. 

Wonderfully relativist

This is an extraordinarily persuasive message, one which appeals to many. It is founded on the emotions and seems to have at its core a philanthropy of positive sentimentality which breaks down barriers so love can triumph and people are set free to find true happiness wherever it may lie. It erases the line in the sand, there are no limits beyond the desire of an individual. It also offers us all a very handy moral ambiguity - we get to decide the shape that water takes. If we want to pour it into one vessel, we may; if not another, then we can control that too. We can say one love is legitimate, say that between a woman and a fish; but another is not, say that between a person of faith and God. And if needs be, we can shatter a vessel if it suits us. It's all so wonderfully....relativist.

There is one snag: water does not have a shape, it wanders where it wants - the image being promoted; but it is also, at the end of the day, uncontrollable. Water is the most dangerous element on the planet, its power for destruction is extraordinary and there is little we can do to stop it.  In this, it is also a good image for permissiveness and immorality: it too, when allowed free rein, is uncontrollable and destructive, as we are seeing in contemporary society as more and more human lives drown in the waves of the sexual revolution. One of things we as human beings have to do in order to try and bring some order to our physical world is to build barriers to prevent the great seas and floods from overpowering our lands and cities. If we may mix metaphors, we could call that drawing lines in the sand.

From behind the walls

What is interesting is that those who advocate this position are no strangers to taking the high moral ground themselves and this reveals the inherent contradiction of their view. As they decry limits and the building of walls, they establish limits and build walls to protect themselves. As a number of people have noted: as the celebrities decry Trump's wall, they live behind high walls themselves to separate them from the rest of us and preserve their privileges. The Pope himself has been accused of this hypocrisy as he condemned Trump's plans from behind the Leonine Wall of the Vatican City State. Similarly, as the celebrities denounce the NRA (not an organisation I have a lot of time for myself) they have armed bodyguards standing around them and guarding their homes. 

In terms of the moral position, these are the people who protected abusers in Hollywood for years even when they were out condemning Catholic bishops for their failure to do their duty and protect the vulnerable. The #MeToo campaign has emerged of late to push for change in Hollywood - that's a good thing, but some commentators have suggested that it emerged when the climate was right: when Weinstein had fallen from his throne and now the dangers to careers was not in speaking out, but in defending him. Yet there are those who are condemning Weinstein who laud another offender who is still at large having fled justice a number of years ago. It seems there is a line in the sand for them too, but they want to get to draw where it lies, and if squiggles all over the place to include some and exclude others, so what? It's all relative anyway; just check to see the direction in which the wind is blowing.

The real shape of love

And that's the problem. When you throw out objective moral standards, you end up with individuals deciding what is right and what is wrong (cue: Eden). But what happens if two individuals clash? Then it comes down to who is stronger, richer, more influential or who wins the fight by whatever means necessary. This is not empowerment, this is oppression; it is barbaric. The celebrities wisely live behind their high walls because, thanks to their influence over society, the morality, or lack of it, they have been preaching for years has led to serious problems in the lives of our communities. 

Jesus came to knock down barriers - with his own body on the cross, as St Paul tells us, and for a reason (cf. Ephesians 2:13-18). But he did not come to destroy morality, nor wipe out the limits that wisely govern our behaviour, but rather to offer himself as an example to follow. In Christ we see true goodness and openness, love of neighbour and in his teaching and in his own chaste life, sexual integrity. Christ did not just draw a line in the sand - when he wrote in the sand he wrote down the sins of the hypocrites; rather he sets the cross in the sand. The cross is the limit of love and that is sacrificial to the core; it is not about self-pleasure but agape, the greatest love of all. In Christ, we see the real shape of love and it is not just water: it is water and blood, poured out and offered up as a means of redemption. 

The world of make-believe
In The Shape of Water the main character heads off into the sea with her creature, blissfully leaving a pile of bodies behind her. In Call Me By Your Name, having had his way, the man goes off to find to a fiancée and the teen is left broken and confused; free, it is to be presumed, to eventually explore the life into which he has been initiated - after he gets over the affair, if he gets over it. The warm hazy light and the cinematography all present an illusion, evoke a tear in the warm, darkened cinema or in front of the 110-inch in the salon in the mansion behind the wall; but the reality is very different. 

While some celebrities decry the line in the sand and turn their backs on objective morality (when it suits them), they offer those who are foolish enough to heed them an ephemeral vision of utter naivety which needs a life of luxury and riches to finance it and banish reality from the door. But in the end no one can escape the reality of life, not for long. The movies do not deal in truth but in illusion, they entertain; sadly there are few if any philosophers or theologians among those who make them. Though the industry has the means, and indeed in the Church's eyes the mission, to proclaim the splendour of the truth, for the most part they don't.

That said, there are some in the business who try to do their best to instil standards and values worthy of the moral way of life, and these we must support with our prayers. A good man or woman can do so much to change other hearts - even in the world of make-believe that is Hollywood. We should commend these souls to their patron saint, himself an actor, St Genesius.

Prayer to St Genesius

Holy St Genesius, martyr for Christ,

by the grace of the Holy Spirit

through your acting you came to discover

the truth of the Christian faith.

In your first profession of that faith

you were baptized through the shedding 

of your blood,

offering your life for the praise and glory 

of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Pray for those who dedicate their lives

to the theatrical and cinematic arts.

Like you may they find the presence

of the Lord in their work 

and generously open their hearts to his teaching,

living it in the midst of the challenges

and demands of their calling.

In this novena, I remember most especially…., 

commending him/her/them to your care. 

Let us pray: 

Eternal Father, 

in your love you call all men and women to come to know you 

and to share in your divine life. 

Through the intercession of your martyr, Genesius, 

who responded so generously to the grace of conversion, 

grant that the same grace may be given to those who as yet do not know you, 

and may be renewed in those who do. 

We ask this through Christ our Lord. 

Amen.