THE SINS OF OLIVER STONE
I much appreciated Mark Noll’s perceptive and helpful review of some of the issues raised between film history and professional history-writing [“Losing It at the Movies,” Mar./Apr.]. There is undoubtedly value in recognizing similarities and complementary roles in film and history making. Yet, in the end, those strategies may not serve the best understanding of either history or cinema.
If we view a film like “Nixon” as historians requiring that we be satisfied by the reconstruction of the Nixon of history, we shall, I think, not only be frustrated, but we shall be looking for the wrong thing with the wrong eyes. Instead of a correspondence between story and history, Oliver Stone has produced (successfully or not) a cinematic whole correspondent with its own “world” of characters and actions, and its own language of direction, script writing, acting, scene, dialogue, idea, and so forth. The Nixon of professionally written history and of professionally made film are both capable of raising and resolving questions on the human condition in our time and place, but they do so with different kinds of languages, mediums, informing principles, and determinable effects. I personally found Stone’s Nixon to be more intellectually and emotionally satisfying than his JFK, not because it was “less wanton in treating documented events” but because its action was more probable and its central character more psychologically convincing and satisfying.
The answer to the tensions between film history and professionally written history is not to make filmmakers into better historians. Part of the answer lies, I suggest, in filmmakers becoming better filmmakers in terms of the distinctive powers and limits of their art.
– Robert Warburton
Wheaton, Ill.
TRUE FICTION
Thank you for the article “Naked and Exposed.” And for the editorial, “Stranger in a Strange Land” [Mar./Apr.]. I was happy to see the reference to Walker Percy. I heartily agree with the statement, “What we need, then, is writing that reminds us of who we are.” I firmly believe that the novel is a prime way of doing that. (Which is why I write novels.) Much as I admire the classics, I believe also that this is a never-ending project, that novels which relate to now and here are essential. (Which is why I write about the here and now.) I hope you will continue to give space to fiction reviews.
– Elizabeth Richman
Alsea, Oreg.
CALL IT SHAME
Regarding “Naked and Exposed” [Mar. /Apr.], I must quibble with Hugen and Plantinga’s definition of shame. To distinguish shame from guilt, the authors state that a person who “normally feels bad” about doing something wrong feels “remorse.” They go on to say that “shame,” though “only partly about blameworthiness,” involves “a whole array of other areas in which we think we fall short”: e.g., beauty or height. I would suggest that “embarrassment” is a more fitting word to describe nonmoral cases “in which we think we fall short.” The word “shame” is even more fitting than “remorse” to refer to what Aristotle, in the “Nichomachean Ethics,” described as “the feeling caused by base actions” (Bk. 4, ch. 9).
As the authors note, shame has replaced guilt in the counseling professions, but where they attribute this to “the fading of psychoanalytic theory,” I would suggest that both shame and guilt are on the wane as a result of psychoanalytic theory. Ironically, for a profession based on the study of the “psyche,” psychology does not recognize the soul (in Greek, psyche) and hence must find alternate ways of dealing with the problem of immorality and evil.
– Lucas E. Morel
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, Ark.
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Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 5
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