'Cabrini,' 'American Fiction,' & the American aversion to subtlety
+the impossibility of American Catholicism
The best novels are not, should not be, tendentious, expressing or promoting a special cause or program, no matter how worthy that cause or program…Moral realism attempts to establish morality in what is often its daunting complexity. Moral righteousness is content to reside in its own sense of self-superiority. [Good novels] depict the struggle not only to establish what is good, but to be good.
It’s not exactly news to anyone that I have a knee-jerk reaction to a particularly American brand of moralism. I often sing the praises of amoralists like Wilde and Paglia, who swing the pendulum in the opposite direction of our simplistic, nuance-averse, puritanical culture…though at heart I am not an amoralist, and recognize that this position–when unchecked–can lead to excessive decadence, nihilism, and even fascism (Wilde eventually recognized this, and I hope Paglia will too).
There are several reasons I have such an intense urge to swing the pendulum the other way. I grew up being told by my teachers that I should aspire to moral heroism, that I should will myself to always do the right thing and to be on the right side of history. In college, I was told that to say or do something politically incorrect is to commit a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance. And when I first started exploring Christianity more seriously, I met numerous people for whom religious faith consisted of a set of moral dogmas to be adhered to and sentimental pietistic practices. No one seemed to be able to reckon with Genesis 2 or Romans 7:19.
Eventually, I met people for whom morality was something secondary, flowing out of an ontological and aesthetic awareness of who they were and their place in the universe. Such an attitude toward ethics was not only more appealing, it was also more coherent–it lent itself to being lived in a more realistic way. Whereas the moralists I met–both the religious and secular ones–ended up becoming deeply narcissistic or anti-social, finding the weight of their moralism impossible to bear, took to constantly pointing the finger at the sins of others (or of “the system”) and looking to absolve themselves of their own responsibility, clinging to claims about the need for “self-care” and “protecting my peace” as an escape.
This attitude, which prioritizes ethical matters of what we “ought” to do over ontological questions about what “is,” about the nature of “being,” bled over into the way people I knew engaged with art and culture. For such moralists, the value of a work of art is to be judged by its moral expediency or usefulness. If the message, the content, is “good” or “correct,” then to hell with the form. A poorly written book is good if it tells us to think the right things. I think of a professor who told us that the Spanish film Marcelino Pan y Vino–despite being an utter masterpiece of cinema–was bad because it was used as fascist propaganda (a debatable claim). And I remember attending a screening of the atrociously corny film October Baby at campus ministry, which my classmates claimed to be deeply moved by because of its (overt, in-your-face) pro-life message.
Khachiyan: You have to prepare [when watching most films today] for the woke truck coming to run you over until your skull is splattered on the pavement.
Greenwald: Yeah. They always preach and moralize in a crude way.
Khachiyan: They may as well include a voice over spelling out for viewers who the heroic, virtuous characters are…
Nekrasova: [There’s a difference] between art that’s prepackaged with a correct interpretation and art that generates interesting debates without paralyzing open discussion.
Greenwald: That’s when art is most interesting, when it can take actual parts of life and make you think and make you have doubts about your own initial impressions and reactions and judgments instead of just having to digest messaging.
This past weekend, I saw two movies that were perhaps completely antithetical to each other. In American Fiction, the main character Theolonius “Monk” Ellison complains about so-called “woke” literature, which is bestowed a stamp of approval for having a blatant, straight-forward moral message, despite often being quite poorly written. While working on his own novel, he says that he doesn’t want the protagonist “to do some grandiose speech spoon-feeding everyone the moral of the story. There is no moral. That’s the idea. I like the ambiguity.”
Anti-woke reactionaries, often of a conservative and/or religious persuasion, love to rag on how tedious woke films, shows, and books are. Yet they often forget that woke posturing is merely a secularized version of a certain strain of puritanical Protestant Christianity. Despite having foregone explicit references to God or Scripture, it retains the same moralism, the same simplistic, Manichean metaphysical undergirding…rendering them two sides of the same coin.
Before I tear apart the second film I saw, which perfectly fits Ellison’s characterization of stories full of “grandiose speeches,” “moral spoon-feeding,” and a lack of “moral ambiguity,” allow me to offer a disclaimer. I am personally very close to Mother Cabrini. If you’re close friends with me or was ever a student in one of my classes, I probably have taken you to the Cabrini Shrine in Inwood, where the remains of her body are on display on the altar. (You should also read my reflection on a field trip to the Cabrini shrine, and A.W. Strouse’s reflection on the shrine and immigration.)
Mother Cabrini is one of those saints whose extraordinary feats can only be attributed to something miraculous, to something beyond any human being’s most noble of intentions or earnest efforts. Seriously, how can a small, sickly person–who was told by her doctors that she wouldn’t live past her thirties (she died at 67)–found over 67 hospitals across North and South America with no regular source of income? People like her make me wonder how secular humanists chock up such supernatural acts of charity to mere “benevolence.”
I am extremely grateful that her story, which unfortunately is known to too few people, is being told in mainstream theaters thanks to Angel Studios’ massive budget and marketing smarts. I hope that all people–Catholic, non-Catholic, even atheists–get the chance to hear Cabrini’s story, and are inspired to aspire to live a life of such grandiosity.
All that being said, I must admit to how painful it was to watch Angel Studios’ rendering of her story. The film smacked of all of my worst pet peeves: blatant and simplistic moralizing, kitschy sentimental piety, and a flimsy commitment to artistic integrity. It managed to take the story of an Italian Catholic and pass it through the food processor of the American Protestant imagination…so as to make it easier to digest for American audiences, I suppose.