Last night I finally got to see Higher Ground, the film starring and directed by Vera Farmiga based on the memoir by Carolyn Briggs, This Dark World. It never came close enough for me to see it in the theater, so I waited for Netflix.
It’s hard for me to explain the effect this film had on me. I tried to make Steve stay awake through it, and he was bugging me by pointing out the obvious– the acting and cuts are awkward, the screenplay is not terribly strong. In short, something is “off” in the production and it’s not a great movie.
How could he think that mattered? When it was over, I said, “This is a very important movie for me. They got it right. That’s what I lived. That’s the culture I was in.” Again, he pointed out some annoyingly obvious things: but she was married, wore funny clothes, had children… what do you mean it was like your life?
The exchange reminded me of how I felt after reading Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, an autobiographical novel by a woman that is about her fundamentalist upbringing in a working class British town and also a lesbian coming-of-age novel. Friends had recommended it to me for years as I told my own story about being in a Pentecostal, fundamentalist church from age 13, but I resisted reading it. It couldn’t possibly be about my life. When I read it, I was overwhelmed by how much resonated with me. I loved the book. I sent it to my brother with the note: “This book is about me, except I’m not a lesbian.” I felt the need to add that last phrase because, as an unmarried woman of 28, I think my family was half-expecting me to come out. My brother read it and sent me back a card: “Thanks, Susan. This book is exactly about me– except I’m not a British lesbian.”
So what is it? What is so important that I hope they get it right and it’s the only thing that matters?
Mostly, I think it’s the language. It’s hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t experienced it how language can be so powerful, can so shape one’s being, how one thinks and behaves and relates to others. How bad a simple phrase can make you feel, how inadequate. How much you can want to get this particular way of loving God right. How spectacularly people can fail at it.
In Higher Ground, and in the memoir, it’s the relationship between Corrinne and her friend Annika that stands out the most to me. Annika is a creative, flamboyant woman who is nonetheless devout. She’s clearly been raised in a fundamentalist, Pentacostal church. She prays in tongues. She is sure in her faith, while maintaining her originality. She is happy in the faith. She draws and makes paintings of her husband’s penis. She easily jokes with Corinne. She is immature in ways, but she is easy in her skin and in the culture. I know people like that. They’re astonishing. They don’t struggle with where the “outside world” begins and the inner world of the Christian subculture begins. They live fully.
Steve has a Catholic critique of it. The world of the film made him crazy. “There’s no form! There’s no order! It’s just Scripture and personality. It’s a fantasy world. Thank God for the Church.” When you’re in a born-again Christian environment like the one I grew up in, it feels solid and complete. It feels like people know every answer. They seem right, even when it doesn’t feel quite right. Even when it’s hard (it’s supposed to be hard; it’s obedience). But of course, Steve’s right. You’re at the mercy of personality and Scripture. Of course it often breaks down in destructive shows of ego and misdirected sexuality. The surprising thing, even while I was watching it, was how long the church community depicted in Briggs’ story stays together.
I understand that, too. It is part fantasy– you really want it to work. You really want to become the ones who seem to live it so easily. Who doesn’t want to depend on God and know the truth? But also, you love the other people. They are your family and friends, your primary relationships, your world. You want to be community with them.
I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t lived it can really, fully understand what’s going on here. I think if they did, they would see a film like Jesus Camp in a different light. I hope with more sympathy, but maybe not. In some ways, I think the truest thing about my years in an Assembly of God Church in the South Suburbs of Chicago was the brokenness. There was so much brokenness in the people assembled there, and it was heartbreakingly beautiful to struggle with them in my own brokenness. I wrote in a poem that it came down to “the love, even done this poorly, what little we could do with what the world allowed: our battered hands and this God.”
That mattered. That moves me in this film.