Hebraic Thought On The Big Screen? Biblical Themes in Non-Biblical Movies (Dru Johnson) Ep. #229

Dr. Dru Johnson (00:03)
And now for something completely different. Instead of an interview with a guest today, I’m to be doing a list of movies, movies that I think are more biblical often than movies about the Bible. So better than the 10 Commandments, better than the Prince of Egypt, or ⁓ maybe, okay, so I might have to carve out here the Jesus movie, which is just Luke’s gospel being portrayed on screen. So we’ll carve out things like that.

but adapted screenplays, as we say, about the Bible. So, okay, what are these movies like? What do I mean by biblical movies that aren’t about the Bible? I mean movies that they kind of get what’s going on in scripture, or they get a chunk, a principle or a concept that’s going on in scripture that is rarely explored. Sometimes people, when they portray the biblical story, they kind of miss the thing going on under the surface.

And so these are the movies that get very deep structures in the biblical literature that is often missed by our portrayals of the biblical literature, if that makes sense. Okay, so I’m gonna kind of go a little bit in order here. I’ll bounce around a little bit as well. But number one, I think, and again, these aren’t in like top 10 order, but first, the one that always comes to mind immediately when I think of this category.

is the movie Tree of Life. Of course, the name is titled after the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and in Revelation as well. This is with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt are the main two male characters. Jessica Chastain, I believe, is the main female character. This is a mind blowing movie. Some of you will hate this movie, just quite honestly. There’s no narrative to the movie. It’s set in the 1950s or 1960s in Texas.

It’s a father ⁓ who is just mean to his children. I even saw myself as a father in this movie. Some of the things I say and do, or I did to my kids years ago when they were little, it’s a very ⁓ chastising movie for those of us that didn’t nail it as dads on the first try. But my kids are older and they’ve all forgiven me. But this movie is specifically about Job

I mean, they flash verses of Job This is Terrence Malick, you know, who is an extremely rare filmmaker, I wish to say. He hasn’t put out that many films. But this film doesn’t have a narrative thread to it, so there’s not like a story that you’re following, but it’s portraying what Job may feel like in the 1960s in Texas from a child-parent relationship where, you know, the parents are kind of in a God position.

and the children and the human position on Earth. ⁓ Now interestingly, it also has a break, I don’t want to ruin the movie, but in the middle of the movie where it breaks to Genesis one, just as Job does, it breaks back into creation. So you have a whole, I don’t know, maybe 15 minute section of the movie where it just jumps back and portrays creation in a beautiful way. Again, many of you might hate this movie. I’ve assigned this movie to students and sometimes they like it, sometimes I think it’s about a 50-50.

You kind of have to sit there and just go for the whole ride without any distractions. It’s a beautifully done movie where they also like visually portray the poetics of the Hebrew Bible. And by that, mean, you know, the, camera is often a sweeping or a following camera. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say the, camera is almost used like a brush with brushstrokes. So it’s very impressionistic. If I could put it that way.

I’d like to give an honorable mention here for another movie about ⁓ Job, but from the other perspective, which is what it feels like to be Job. And that is the Coen Brothers movie, probably the most overlooked Coen Brothers movie, besides some of very early films, is A Serious Man, which it’s about a guy who’s a college professor who is trying to…

get tenure. And if you don’t know what that means, it basically means it’s the point in your career where you show your colleagues everything, all the work you’ve done, all the research you’ve done, all the publications you’ve ⁓ made. And then they decide basically whether they want to bring you on as a permanent faculty member. So it’s a big point in many people’s lives for universities that still give out tenure, few as those may be still today. And this guy’s life absolutely falls apart.

right in the middle of this. And I mean like his kids, his wife, his marriage, his house. ⁓ And then you have this kind of divine tornado, I guess, that enters at the end. ⁓ So again, if you want to feel what it’s like to be Job where everything is slipping away, it’s unclear whether he’s as righteous as Job is. ⁓ And I would say for this movie, there’s one scene.

that’s called the Goy’s Teeth. you just go on YouTube, if you want a teaser and look up the Goy, G-O-Y, the Goy’s Teeth, you will see one of the most wonderful micro stories within a movie I have ever seen in my life. I show it to every class that I can and they always are stupefied by it. But it’s like Job’s friends trying to tell him about why these things are happening or not all helping why these things are happening.

Okay, so Jobe and Genesis 1 creation, think Tree of Life, unmistakable. ⁓ I might also put in this category Noah. Now Noah is a movie about, this is Darren Arnofsky’s movie, it’s about Noah. But it also gets at lots of themes, you because the Noah story, I would say is not even a story, it’s not a narrative in Genesis, it ⁓ seems to be a chiastic account, like a very structured parallel account. ⁓

And so there’s not much story to tell in the story of Noah, but there is a wonderful sequence of events in the movie where Darren Aronofsky seems to get something that’s going on throughout scripture, which is when God sends signals and signs to his chosen people, they don’t always interpret them correctly. And that’s a theme that I always emphasize throughout scripture is that every time a sign and wonder is done by God, right? He’s causing the sign and wonder to happen. People…

always misinterpret them. So I don’t know of anybody else who picks up on that as well as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah does. So set aside the fact that it’s about Noah because it gets lots of things. It does lots of interesting things with the Noah story that I could not go along with, ⁓ that I think distort it beyond recognition in some ways. But that aspect of the movie captures the deep cuts of ⁓ the thinking of biblical literature. Okay, moving on to Genesis 4.

I guess jumping back to Genesis 4 from Genesis 6 through 9. Sorry, I’m going to be jumping around here quite a bit. Is the movie East of Eden based on the book East of Eden. ⁓ This book, and hence the movie, the movie is about the kind of the second half of the book. But it portrays this issue of, they even have a long conversation in the book about the Hebrew verb, Timshal, which shows up in. ⁓

in the Genesis account itself and what it means and these two brothers and their parallel lives together and sibling rivalry. And again, you the book is kind of framed as what’s going on with Cain and Abel to some extent and other stories in Genesis, but it’s really diving deeply into the depravity of human beings that happen outside of the garden, right? Like how…

psychopathic even, sociopathic humans can be, which is portrayed by a particular female character, Cathy, in this ⁓ book and movie. ⁓ John Steinbeck just seems to have mastered the human psyche and its goodness and its corruption and plays it out in various ⁓ penetrating ways. It’s an amazing book. I hesitate to read anybody to read ⁓

the book, East of Eden, until you’re at least 30, maybe even 40 years old, because you might think it’s too fantastical. ⁓ But once you’ve lived long enough, you’ll be like, yeah, actually, I know people like these people in the book. But you might not actually believe these are real kinds of people if you’re too young when you read it. I think that would have been the case for me, at least. Okay, so East of Eden, again, it’s there in the title, but it really is a book about… ⁓

the 19th century farming in California. That’s the setting of the book, but they’re exploring very deeply these structures of corruption in human character, including sibling rivalry, but also kind of sociopathic behaviors and ⁓ the kind of selfish narcissistic needs that get developed by people who are not nurtured by their parents, et cetera. It’s all in there. It’s a total package. It’s fairly amazing.

Okay, along those lines, I’m going to say number four here is ⁓ Magnolia. Now, if you’ve never heard of Magnolia, came out in 1998, I believe, won the Oscar for best movie. It’s a long movie. It’s got lots of stars in it. I was gonna say Gillian Andersen. No, it’s Julianne Moore. I get those two actresses confused. Julianne Moore, Tom Cruise. I like to joke it’s the only movie that Tom Cruise has ever acted in. He’s been in lots of movies, but he really.

acts in this movie. ⁓ Let’s see who else is in here. Jason Robards, William H. Macy, ⁓ Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rest in Peace. ⁓ It’s just a it’s a cavalcade of stars. ⁓ Some of them before they were ultra famous.

and I don’t want to ruin it, but it’s one of those movies where there are like five or six independent storylines going on. You just get a little bit of this storyline, then a little bit of this storyline, then a little bit of this storyline. And it is unclear for the longest time how these storylines intersect. When I think of movies that did this really well, Pulp Fiction, I think was the first movie I ever saw that did that exquisitely. ⁓ And so it’s an interesting storytelling technique. ⁓ I find it fascinating. It’s a long movie.

But essentially what you figure out along the way, and I will say there is a verse from Exodus that is cited throughout the movie. It’s kind of in code. know, it’s like where numbers show up in the movie and all of a sudden you realize they’re talking about one specific verse in Exodus. And then something from the Exodus story happens in Southern California in the 1990s, right? So it’s set in Southern California in the 1990s.

in and around the showbiz industry. And what you get to see in this movie, and it’s whispered throughout the movie, and again I don’t want to give too much away, is how the sins of two fathers are spilling out into the lives of the people they affected. ⁓ So when you talk about something like generational sin, if you want an image of what generational sin might I’m not saying this is what it is in scripture, I’m just saying if you wanted an image of what it might be,

Magnolia is like a two hour and 40 minutes version of generational sin of two men just flowing out from the peaks of their mountains and to all the valleys of the people they’ve affected in their lives. Okay, so that’s Magnolia. I skipped over one here. just realized, so that was number four. I didn’t give you number three, which is, again, these are in no particular order. No country for old men.

Now, this is based on Cormac McCarthy’s book. Again, you have that kind of, this is bordering along with what happens in East of Eden, that kind of absolute sociopathic, psychopathic, I’m not using these terms in any kind of clinical way, know, that disconnect where someone can just, know, no conscience, kill, kill, kill, you know, the movie is as dark as I presume the book is, I haven’t read the book.

but there’s somebody just going around and killing, killing, killing, and it’s so devoid of morality that it feels like it almost sucks your life out as you’re watching the movie. So job well done, right, if that was the goal of the director. ⁓ And I would say that this, again, like several of these movies, you could use these to kind of help you imagine what is so bad in Genesis six, right? If you think about,

the violence and the wickedness of humanity has ruined the earth, as it says in Genesis 6, or it’s ruined the ground under humanity’s feet. And you think, like, what could be so bad? Imagine a world of the character, at least one of the characters from this movie. Again, I don’t want to ruin it if you haven’t seen it, but you’ll know which one I’m talking about, the one that carries around the bolt. ⁓ Imagine a world full of those people, right, where there is no stopping them. They are just a force for evil constantly everywhere, and they have no

sense of direction or morality. So we’ll pick this up in a couple places of a kind of a negative image where the movie actually offers the opposite of what might be considered good by the biblical authors there. Coming off of ⁓ Magnolia then and that idea of the sins of the father, here’s another one that I think I didn’t actually realize. I’d seen this movie a dozen

maybe two dozen times when I was a kid, had no idea what the movie was about. And that is Breakfast Club. Okay, so I was feeling nostalgic a year or two ago on a long flight back from Europe. And I was like, I’m gonna watch The Breakfast Club again and just see if it holds up over time. And that’s when I discovered that this movie was not about what I thought it was about, which was these quirky kids doing quirky things. The movie is actually about…

their parents and how their parents messed up each one of these kids in their own special way. The nerd, the jock, the outsider, right, the freak, how they’re all just various byproducts of what offscreen happens is really bad parenting. Parents that don’t seem to care or they care that their children act in particular ways. And so we see in Breakfast Club again, kind of the sins of the fathers and mothers that spill out.

What we’re seeing is the sins of the fathers and the mothers gathered in a detention room in the library over one Saturday morning. So that, you know, we could pick lots of movies now that kind of have the sins of the fathers baked into it, but those seem like very poignant versions of it. Okay, real quick mention, something like Schindler’s List. I think we could think of somebody who…

⁓ No greater love has anyone than this who would someone who laid down their life for their friends write this idea of how Schindler acts self-sacrificially a grace ⁓ that is given to him to act in such a way that doesn’t make any sense to us but seems to be so human all too human as Nietzsche would say and an idea of grace and laying down one’s own benefits and own ⁓ their own interest for the sake of others ⁓

again is kind of on full display here in Schindler’s List. Now you can quibble whether Schindler is actually the ultimate expression of that or not, but we can at least celebrate the fact that he stood up and did the right thing from his perspective in that time. Okay, so I’m not gonna make many more cheap and easy or lazy moves like that one, but you know, we can put those out there as well as the kinds of movies that are thinking about the deep thinking of scripture. Okay.

So here’s again, some problematic ones. I wrestled like, I? Most of these movies are R rated. Most of them are very hard to watch. And I think that’s because scripture is often talking about the dark side of humanity or putting it on full display, but always showing that humans can be better, right? They can be better than what they are through God. So.

And these next two ⁓ movies, and again, we could pick lots that would fit in this category, but that are really exploring the depths of what it means when a boy doesn’t have a father to guide him in wisdom. So I’m thinking like movies that are kind of portraying Proverbs one through nine. I probably could have picked some positive versions of this. I should have. I’m sure there’s some all kinds of.

feel-good movies that would help portray a positive where you have a coach over your shoulder really helping someone figure out their life and their meaning in life or a good father or father figure in their life. But I’m thinking of Proverbs 1 through 9 where it just repeats, listen my son to your father, do not forsake your mother’s Torah, right? So it’s the only time I think Torah comes out of a human’s mouth is it’s your mom’s Torah. But then it’s the father that keeps on talking to the young man. Incline your ear, listen to me, listen to me, incline your ear.

And then wisdom itself, and ⁓ later when you have the two, Lady Folly and Lady Wisdom, Lady Wisdom also says, the one who listens to me is the one who gains ⁓ wisdom, right? That whole poem about Lady Wisdom ends with intensification of listen to me, listen to me, listen to me, right? So I think we have a couple of movies that display what it looks like when young men listen to Lady Folly. When young men get caught up, when someone…

in a predatory mode exploits young men by seeking their heart that desperately wants an older man or an older woman, a mother and father to guide them wisely through their life. They step into vulnerable young men who don’t have mothers and fathers who are guiding them and they guide them instead. And I think an excellent example of this is American History X, where you have a young man who is bright, intelligent, ⁓ articulate, and it’s based on true story with… ⁓

the White Aryan Resistance in Southern California with Tom Metzger in the 1990s. I actually had a friend growing up in my skinhead group who was actually part of that movement. He went to jail ⁓ and kind of got reformed, just like the guy in American History X. In fact, the story of American History X is his story with Tom Metzger, the White Aryan Resistance. He went to prison for ⁓ attempting to gas a synagogue in Dallas and… ⁓

And then he reformed. basically got away from the ⁓ white power movement and he hung out with us, non-racist skinheads when we were all young teenagers acting goofy and doing stupid things still. Okay, so it actually is his story, but it’s not just his story. There was a series of young men that this happened to in real life. American History X captures that story where you have a Tom Metzger character who is a father figure who adopts, he finds these young men who are smart.

and natural leaders, and then he brings them in and grooms them as we would say today. He grooms them into this kind of hatred and this white power, nationalistic movement. And then he kind of uses and abuses and then moves on to the next one. So I think Proverbs 1 through 9 is on full display in the negative format. It’s the exact opposite. It’s the black to the white of what Proverbs 1 through 9 hopes for.

⁓ You could also hit an honorable mention, which feels weird to say, would be movies like Cidade de Deus or The City of God. It’s a Brazilian film. Again, you have a bunch of young men who are just looking for love. They’re looking for leadership from older men, father figures or father and mother based scenario. They’re not getting it. And so the kinds of horrors they commit as part of gang activity, because somebody will pick up the mantle. Somebody will guide them.

when their natural fathers and mothers can’t or won’t guide them. And so this movie is kind of a warning of what happens. These types of movies are warnings of what can happen ⁓ when we don’t have a Proverbs 1-9 situation. Okay. So let’s talk about memory for a second and movies about memory. And these are movies that I would relate to Deuteronomy. And again, these are going to be the negative image of Deuteronomy. You can tell I like dark and gritty. So there’s probably a…

a rainbows and glorified, happy version of all of these instances that I’m thinking of. But the biblical authors often like dark and gritty as well. They like to depict how dark humans can get and what kinds of problems we can create for ourselves. They do not shy away. So the first movie here, when I think of Deuteronomy, if Deuteronomy is the idea is that God wants the community of Israel, all the people.

to in their embodied actions and their singing of songs and their performing of sacrifices and rituals that he’s prescribed for them and their keeping of justice and righteousness in the land, that is their memory of who God wants them to be. And by remembering correctly, they see forward correctly. They see what they’re supposed to be doing. They can see into the future, right? In a certain way. And ⁓ that’s the ideal of Deuteronomy is that

the memory of God and who Israel is and who they’re supposed to be is burned into their memories through all this communal activity that God prescribed for them, including in Deuteronomy, God commands that they memorize a song. I bet most of us don’t know the song, but God actually commanded Israel to memorize a song. What’s the opposite of this? I think of something like memento. Now, some of you who are movie buffs may be able to nitpick with my choices here, but I think of something like…

Memento also I might put in this category movies like eternal sunshine of a spotless mind so in Memento a it’s unclear exactly Whether he participated in his wife’s death I’ve heard the director speaking and he almost speaks as if he wants to leave it in that Ambiguous state of whether you don’t know whether he was involved in his wife’s death or not But either way, it’s one man who can’t remember anything, but he has a very short

term memory that repeats on regular cycles and then he loses all of his memory. And so here you see kind of the horror of what happens when all memory is siphoned down to one person and even that one person can’t hold any kind of stable memory in their head, right? So this is kind of the opposite of what Deuteronomy wants were. The memory of who Israel is and who they should be is held across the people and over time.

by remembering their past, remembering their faults in the past, right? Not just remembering the good stuff, but remembering their faults and then ⁓ celebrating forward into who God has called them to be. And again, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind also explores this idea of what if you could just erase parts of your memory, get rid of the parts that you don’t like that are unsavory and explores all the ways in which that can go sideways on you. And again, that’s one of the…

few movies that think Jim Carrey really acts. His acting is really good in that movie. Another movie, strangely about memory, in fact the title track to the soundtrack of the movie is Remember Me, Recuerdo Me. This is the movie Coco. It’s an animated movie, but it’s about the Dia de los Muertos. It’s the Day of the Dead.

and the celebration of the dead and kind of like maybe what’s being imagined by the day of the dead metaphysics but this movie is actually less about memory for me and that it explores this idea that you get in scripture of you know death and going into Sheol or one of the problems there is you don’t have long life in the land and long life in the land is not just my life in the land good life in the thinking of the biblical authors is me living long and then

dying and awaiting resurrection as it eventually gets unrolled in scripture, but also that I have children and grandchildren, So that, that my, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, my, my name is somehow carried out and there’s something noble to that throughout scripture. And so there’s always something sad or lamented in the Psalms when somebody dies that their name is being cut off.

When I think of views of annihilationalism, I always wonder if they’re taking seriously this concept of your name being cut off from the land, that that might be the most cruel thing you could do to a person is to kind of extinguish their name. But I don’t know. I mean, there’s lots to be said there. It’s just a thought, not a fully developed thought. OK, those are the kinds of movies that I’m thinking about. Coco, again, this last one.

has this idea of like, yeah, if people don’t remember you, then was your existence meaningful? I think is the question of Coco, if I remember correctly. All of these movies I’m pulling from the last time I saw them, which in some cases was 10 to 15 years ago. So tell me what you think. I would love to hear your list or add some onto it and what books or ideas in the Bible do you think other movies depict really, really well?

And with that, I bid you adieu.