Abandoned Altars

The summer movie season is in full swing, and so far two films have gained my notice for their clerical characters: The Da Vinci Code, where prelates plot with murderous monks to conceal juicy secrets about Jesus, and Nacho Libre, a light-hearted comedy about a monk who becomes a Mexican wrestler.

Not much reason for the cardinals to go to the matinees these days. Long gone indeed are the days when the film industry catered to the Catholic crowd with safe and morally uplifting propaganda like Going My Way.

For the last several years, I’ve been working on a list of movies, which I call The Fallen Priests Film Festival. Every feature film or TV mini-series I could find that had priests or nuns or indeed, any kind of Christian minister in trouble is included there. I’m sure there’s many more, but I think I’ve found the most important ones by now. I’ve found quite a surprising amount.

Nearly 200 actually, ranging from inspirational fluff to outright pornography. Some are from classic European literature, like Friar Tuck from Robin Hood. Many are based on historical works - modern day lives of the saints and warning tales of the damned. But in fiction, the latter, it seems, far outweigh the former.

Not surprising, really. Drama depends on conflict, and sinners are always more interesting than saints. But these days it seems as if piety is not on the cinematic agenda as it once was.

Despite all the bad priests in the news these days, many of the most lurid of these films belonging to sub-genres including exorcism spectacles, nunsploitation, and killer confessional movies aren’t that new. Most were produced in the 1970s, so many that the decade could be dubbed the Golden Age of fallen clergy cinema.

The reason, I think, is simple. Despite its propaganda potential, Hollywood primarily worships Mammon. The studios large and small respond to whatever the moguls think will increase sales at the box office, and nowadays, the home DVD market. In the old days, the studios groveled before the Catholic Church with its film review boards and such groups as the Legion of Decency. These could mobilize masses of the faithful into making or breaking a picture in a way that the Catholic League today can only have wet dreams of.

If the movie Powers That Be thought the public wanted more films with priests doing good things played by top-flight stars like Robert DeNiro, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, or even Tom Cruise, for God’s sake, they’d start cranking them out tomorrow. The fact is that Hollywood won’t make pious pictures because the public wouldn’t believe them and doesn’t want them, and the studios wouldn’t make a dime. Even science fiction has got to be plausible.

Still, it took a long time for things to change.

A few films in the early 60s picked up on the brewing discontent but hardly a critical voice was raised before the Second Vatican Council. It was only afterwards, when the people stopped listening to the bishops’ rant about contraceptive choices, they also ceased paying attention to their entertainment advice, too.

And they could afford to without the fear of hell, for with Vatican II, whether intended or not, it seemed that the old rules were tossed out the window. Studios suddenly felt free to tell whatever story they wanted to. And so they did, almost as if with a vengeance.

Good priests remained in film, of course, usually as exorcists. (In the movies, nobody ever goes to Protestants for deliverance, but only to the Men in Black Dresses.) But now, even the best priests were usually painted as tortured loners. Nor were filmmakers afraid any longer to depict the worst priests as devil-worshippers or crazed fanatics.

Reality is still carefully avoided. Only a tiny handful of movies, mainly based on current news stories, dare deal with priests sexually abusing kids. Even a fairly recent film with such a title as The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys still turns out to be an innocent Catholic coming of age flick, and not the grim horror one would expect from the headlines.

Far more films, it seems, have been intimately concerned with nuns.

For even as the sisters fled their convents, a new movie genre was born: “nunsploitation“. Films, mainly Italian but with a surprisingly broad range from Mexico to Japan, depicted young women unwillingly forced into the convent, where they were raped, abused, and subjected to any number of brutal depravities, some quite bizarre or even satanic.

These are the cinematic granddaughters of Maria Monk and her fellow nuns on the run of the 19th century. Surprisingly, even some of the schlockiest of these films were often based on true events, biographies, or even minor stories by great writers. Their continued popularity is probably due to the forbidden mysteries of the convent, the lure of lesbianism to many heterosexual men, and let’s face it, a lot of repressed parochial schoolboy fantasies…

This stuff had always been around; but only with the dead hand of the Church removed could it be released on film, even if it was usually in the form of B-movies, soft porn, and late night creepy creature features.

But in any case, if you’re clerically bicurious, there’s a lot of hierarchically unblessed movies available to consider this summer. Nothing to take the heat of day away like the chill of an exorcism movie at night.

Enjoy! I hope my webpage proves of some service. As for me, I think some more research into that nunsploitation stuff is in order. Yeah, that’s the ticket… research!

See you at the movies. ;->