When I began teaching modern world literature I wrote to the cultural attaches of several embassies in Washington, asking them what they thought my students should read. The PLO Fed-Ex’d me a box of hardcover books. The South Koreans put me in touch with several editors and translators. The Soviets never answered. Not a peep. A Sovietologist finally told me, “Those Commies will never answer. They’re afraid they might say the wrong thing and end up like Ivan Denisovich.”
Recently I interviewed Sergei Bodrov, whose Academy Award-nominee Prisoner of the Mountains (now in American theaters) was Russia’s number-one film last summer. Sitting in my classroom, he told my students that some of the Russian generals in the Chechen war were stupid. Such candor would have resulted in his quick disappearance a few short years ago.
Indeed, his fine film couldn’t have been made during the Afghan war in the eighties. (To be perfectly fair, a similar film couldn’t have been made in America during the Vietnam War. With the notable exception of John Wayne’s unintentional parody The Green Berets, the American film industry avoided the topic until long after that war was over.) But Russia has changed.
Prisoner of the Mountains is an updated version of Leo Tolstoy’s poignant short story “Prisoner of the Caucasus,” written nearly 150 years ago. “It’s really the same war,” Bodrov says. “But Tolstoy had been a soldier in the Russian army, and he saw it from the Russian point of view. I wanted to show the conflict from a more ambiguous perspective.”
Remembering the bitter cultural polarization Americans suffered during Vietnam, I asked him if Russians questioned his patriotism. “A few nationalists were very upset with the movie,” he admitted, “but most Russians saw it as a reflection of a tragedy. Chechnya is part of Russia, but the generals who got us into this latest war behaved stupidly. They went in and brutally provoked the Chechens, then tried to fight the war with raw, untrained soldiers. But then, the Chechens have some stupid leaders too.”
As in the Tolstoy story, two Russian soldiers are captured by Chechens and held for ransom. Tolstoy’s Chechens kidnap solely for profit. In Bodrov’s version, a village patriarch seeks an exchange for his son, who is being held in the Russian garrison. The film also touches on the much-publicized Chechen tactic of releasing soldiers to their mothers, on the condition that they not take up arms again. Some of Prisoner’s most powerful moments center on the plight of the two parents, who want their children back.
One captured soldier, Sasha, is a hardened veteran, who admits, “I enlisted because I was stupid, loved guns, and needed money. But then I began to like it.” Vanya, played by Sergei Bodrov’s draft-age son, has not yet lost his innocence. He can identify with the Chechens’ grievances and wishes them no harm. “We have to kill them,” Sasha corrects him. “Don’t you see? It’s war.”
Bodrov sympathizes with both soldiers. “From the perspective of a soldier,” he says, “Sasha is absolutely correct. You must kill without feeling. But being a good soldier keeps you from achieving your ultimate goal of peace. Anyone can start a war, but it takes a person who is willing to be a bad soldier to stop one. At some point someone has to show mercy.”
Both Tolstoy and Bodrov portray Dina, an enchanting young girl, as the spiritual center of the story. Played with remarkable depth by 12-year-old Susanna Mekhralieva, Dina understands, on a tactical level, that her Russian friends must be shot, but she refuses to accept it morally.
When Bodrov had only one print of his newly edited movie, Boris Yeltsin requested a private screening. He watched it at home with his wife and children, then thanked Bodrov and told him he had found it very moving.
“At that time,” Bodrov says, “Yeltsin’s Chechen policy was ‘no negotiations.’ A week or two later he softened and began to negotiate. I’m not saying my film alone changed his mind, but I think it might have helped him to see that the war was being fought by real people.”
Stefan Ulstein is a teacher and film critic. He is the author of Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism and Grace (InterVarsity).
Postmodernism with a Twang
My work requires frequent trips from southwest Michigan to the Chicago area. Driving I-94 around the southern tip of Lake Michigan does not rank high on my list of favorite things to do. Recently, I found myself dodging semis and potholes once again. Drowsiness prompted me to switch from a soporific clarinet concerto and begin station-surfing. An oldies station is my stimulant of choice on the highway. Nothing gets us baby boomers cranked like the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or Motown. Alas, no oldies station was in range. But my attention was suddenly riveted by a powerful surge from a country-and- western station.
IT’S ALL INTERPRETATION. TO FIND THE TRUTH YOU GOTTA READ BETWEEN THE LINES. The singer blared those lines in a typically nasal but not unpleasant voice. I was instantly wide awake. I had always thought there was probably more truth in your typical country-and-western song than in your average philosophical treatise. However, I had not counted on a group of good ole boys from Nashville latching on to the latest French fashions designed by Foucault and Derrida.
Recently I had helped to organize a seminar on “Postmodernism and Christianity” led by philosopher Merold Westphal. On Westphal’s reading, postmodernism emphasizes two great themes. One is what Nicholas Wolterstorff has called interpretation-universalism, the claim that reality cannot be known as it is in itself, but only as it appears to us humans. We only know things relative to our human conceptual systems, and such systems are irreducibly plural and contingent. Derrida had never said it better: It’s all interpretation.
The other major theme is the hermeneutics of suspicion, the attitude of people like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx that the claims humans make to truth always reflect some hidden agenda, usually one involving power over others. Step aside, Foucault: To find the truth you gotta read between the lines.
I knew, of course, that postmodernism was all the rage in academic circles; I had even seen a reference or two in Newsweek. But had postmodernism penetrated the world of country-and-western music? Images of Tammy Wynette and George Jones struggling to comprehend Derrida rocketed wildly through my head. Had Lacan replaced the Bible and hard living as the source of country lyrics? Surely, I thought, if there is a world where the old verities are secure, it is the world of country-and-western music, a world where cheating always brings heartbreak, boozing leads to losing, and prisoners mournfully contemplate their just punishment for their crimes. Yet there it was: It’s all interpretation. To find the truth you gotta read between the lines. Eat your heart out, Professor Gadamer.
On the return journey I heard it again, this time in its entirety, and I was astounded to learn that the song, titled “It’s All in Your Head” and sung by a group named Diamond Rio, was giving a Christian version of postmodernism. The speaker in the song is a sidewalk preacher’s son, passing on the philosophy of his father, who was always “looking forward to the end of the world.” Such an eschatology surely implied the end of modernity, though I am not sure whether postmodernity really is a sign that the end times are upon us. But the preacher’s refrain embodied the deep-seated mistrust of all authority that lies at the heart of postmodernism:
Don’t ever trust what the government say
We never walked on the moon
Elvis ain’t dead
You ain’t going crazy
It’s all in your head.
Later the preacher confirmed his postmodernist bent by informing the listeners that “heaven’s more than a place–it’s a state of mind.” There it is in a nutshell: Religious doctrines express human experiences rather than describe objective reality. To the singer, this is all a reminder that each of us must somehow “work out our own salvation.”
The ending of the song placed my whole interpretation in doubt, however. The son sadly explains that his preacher father, in a quest for his own personal truth, had handled a snake whose “venom turned out to be stronger than Daddy’s faith.” Could the song be an ironic affirmation of objective reality after all? We ignore the real world at our peril since it is only too ready to turn and bite us you-know-where. Perhaps. In any case, the preacher has the last word. “With his dying breath” he repeats his claims about Elvis and the moon.
It’s all interpretation. To find the truth you gotta read between the lines. Heaven is a “state of mind. State of mind.” Amen?
C. Stephen Evans is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and author of The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford University Press).
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 6
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