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For a film that is so visually beautiful and rich in period detail, an atmosphere of quintessentially 20th century totalitarianism hangs around Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of ShÅ«saku EndÅ’s novel Silence.
Inquisitors, denunciations, show trials, peasants terrified of admitting their true beliefs, all true to EndÅ’s original, could mutatis mutandis be taken from 1930s Russia. Silence is about a series of specific events in a specific time in a very specific place, but it is also about something much bigger. As is so often the case, the universal is accessed through the particular.
For those who are not acquainted with the film, the book, or Makoto Fujimura’s meditation on both –which will be discussed in this and two following posts – be warned: this blog contains some spoilers. For those who are about to acquaint themselves with it – be warned: the story is extremely harrowing, and the film an exhaustingly tense and penetrating treatment of moral and spiritual pain.
In Japan, in the second quarter of the 17th century, two young Jesuits go in search of their former teacher, a missionary priest who had become caught up in the savage persecution of the once 300,000 strong Japanese Christian community and who, it is rumoured, had apostatised. They find him, eventually, but in the process get caught up in the persecution – scaldings, drownings, burnings, beheadings, public torture. They are agonising to watch although not so much because they are grotesquely graphic (this is no Japanese The Passion of the Christ) but because the emotional and spiritual pain is so unbearable.
The film centres on how the priests, one of them in particular, deals with consequences – the challenge that physical pain, his own and that of his flock, poses to his faithfulness to God and, over and above that, the challenge that God’s silence poses to him.
Here comes the spoiler. He fails. Without divulging too much more, he avoids the martyrdom that he envisaged and evades the blood that he himself says is the seed of the church, and he does so by denying Christ.
The nature of that denial is interesting and worthy of debate as is the final image (and message) of the story but what that film indubitably shows in its central figure (though not, it should be stressed, in all its figures) is that pain triumphs over piety, the body will overpower the mind, and our greatest fear wins out against our greatest love.
And it is here that, for this cinemagoer at least, the totalitarian connection was strongest; for this is more or less the same trial that Winston Smith faces in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. No Jesuit he, Smith’s battle is nonetheless for something recognisably similar: his freedom, his integrity, his dignity – for, in effect, his soul. Confronted by powers that seek to control his very thoughts, Smith betrays his love and his lover, Julia, who also betrayed him.
“Sometimes,” she says to him when they meet after Room 101, “they threaten you with something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, ‘Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.’”
It’s no use pretending you didn’t mean it afterwards. “At the time when it happens you do mean it…You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.” Ultimately, at the very end of the day, humans will look after themselves before they look after the other; they will betray their greatest love – in Silence’s case Christ, in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s a more obviously earthly passion – to maintain themselves. We are all weak, to the point of death.
Silence, however, is not Nineteen Eighty-Four, or at least not quite, because of the reasons that hover in the air behind the priest’s denial. Winston and Julia live in an ultimately material world, in which there is nothing beyond the here and now. If matter wins out over mind, the flesh over the spirit, fear over faith, the self over the other, then that, by definition, is the end of the story.
The film does not deny any of those victories, nor does it try and soften them by any nonsense about heaven making it all OK in the end. The idea of “paradise” plays an important role in the film, but it is certainly not redemptive, let alone salvific.
The difference in Silence is in the idea that hangs like an ungraspable mist in the background, that our betrayal is not the final word because Christ did not betray. The priest’s denial is not ultimate because, before him, Christ, in whom we can somehow dwell, underwent the same trial to the end. In short, it was precisely the cross that permits the priest to deny the cross without losing his soul.
Silence never denies the weakness and failure that haunts and breaks human life. It refuses any cheap consolation or redemption. Indeed, it hardly offers any expensive redemption. But it does pose the question, asked by one of the film’s more obviously flawed characters, “Where is the place of a weak man in a world like this?” And it implies that the final answer to the question lies less in overcoming our weakness than in acknowledging it.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos | @theosnick
This is part of a mini-series reflecting on Silence. Check out:
- Paul Bickley's review of Silence, the original book by ShÅ«saku EndÅ;
- Natan Mladin's review of Silence and Beauty, a meditation on EndÅ's book by Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura
- An interview with Makoto Fujimura by Natan and Nick
Image via Youtube, available under CreativeCommons
Interested by this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e-newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Friends Programme to find out how you can help our work.
