07 Mar Oscar Redemption
Show me a culture’s art and I will tell you what that culture values. My history professor in college would say something along these lines and then show how certain pieces of art reflected the cultures that produced them.
Similarly, if we have a desire to put a finger on the pulse of our own culture, it may be best to start the process by looking at the art we produce, or better yet, by looking at the art that is said to be the best of what we produce.
That’s where the distinguished members of the Academy come in and decide what should be considered the “best”. And, whether you take their word for it or not, when our great grandchildrens’ history professors look back on our culture, they will likely look to the Academy of Arts to tell them the ideas we valued most and held to the tightest. In regard to this year’s Oscar winners, you can almost hear the historians of tomorrow, human or otherwise (bearded either way, one would think) saying that the men and women of our age were trying desperately to atone for the sins of previous generations. They may look to our films as the reparations we never paid except in concepts and ideals, the pleas for forgiveness that received fame and riches in return. I suppose that’s the risk Brad Pitt took in producing 12 Years A Slave, a film that rawly portrayed the atrocity of slavery in America. For years the pundits will claim that he did not atone for slavery but instead exploited it for Best Picture accolades. After all, the Academy loves films that portray atrocities. They’re always favorites. Maybe Pitt was just working the system for a golden statue?
Whatever his motives, the fact that his film was awarded Best Picture says something about our culture. We love a cause. We love fighting against injustice and atrocities, especially from the comfort of the theater (because that’s not so risky). We love charity, especially if we can buy a pretty pair of shoes or a cup of coffee for ourselves in the process of being charitable. We love atonement and redemption, especially if we can atone for and redeem ourselves, for this is the greatest form of self-promotion and independence.
“The themes of personal redemption and transformation are too strong and we can’t get enough of that as a culture.”
Case and point: take a look at the winners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, both great stories of redemption in and of themselves and both receiving Oscars for their roles in Dallas Buyers Club. Both had to undergo extensive physical transformation for their roles and both had to separate themselves from the places in which they had landed, McConaughey as the perennial male lead in romantic comedies and Leto as the promising young actor turned mediocre musician. The combination of these factors was simply too much to go unawarded by the Academy. The themes of personal redemption and transformation are too strong and we can’t get enough of that as a culture. And, best of all, these gentlemen pulled themselves up out of the mediocrity we expected of them and did something worthy of being called great. They redeemed themselves.
Or did they? McConaughey’s acceptance speech seemed to state otherwise. He was thankful as only a man who feels unworthy can be thankful. It’s not as if he isn’t proud of his work, but he understands that he has been given opportunities others have not. He is more aware of what he has been given than of what he has earned. If McConaughey’s Oscar is a story of redemption, he would say that he did not redeem himself but that redemption was provided for him.
“We are only truly redeemed when something outside of us steps in and does the redeeming.”
And if we, who claim to be the redeemed, have a point of agreement with our culture, it is that we all value redemption and atonement. However, we would differ from our culture insomuchas we believe we can not provide such things for ourselves. In fact, if the lovers of redemption in our culture are to enjoy the fullest expression of what they love, we would say they must first jettison the belief that they are responsible for gaining it by their own power and will. We are only truly redeemed when something outside of us steps in and does the redeeming. We only gain the redemption we say we believe in when we accept what we don’t want to believe in, namely, that we are helpless to save ourselves.
Brad Pitt’s film may possibly have been an attempt at self-atonement, but the story he produced portrays a different view. Solomon North is a free black man living in New York who is abducted and sold as a slave in the south. At the end of the film he returns to his family after 12 years in slavery and inexplicably asks that they forgive him. Despite being a victim, Solomon has spent more than a decade living with the self-inflicted guilt of abandoning his family. Despite his innocence, he still craves atonement, and the only people who can grant it are those he feels he has wronged. He cannot forgive himself until he has been forgiven, and that is true of all us, guilty or innocent. You have nothing to be forgiven for, his wife tells him through her tears. And that is what we all long for in an ultimate sense: to listen to eternity’s final verdict on our souls and hear, You have nothing to be forgiven for. Is such a thing even possible? Could we as human beings, responsible for atrocities global and personal for which we can never atone, ever hear such words said of us? We are the redeemed. We not only believe it could happen, we believe it has.
– Jonathan Allston