Motion Pictures and LDS Cultural Tensions
By Terryl L. Givens

Editor’s note:  This article, which is part two of a three-part series, is excerpted an article titled “Mormon Cinema and the Paradoxes of Mormon Culture,” from the BYU Studies special issue “Mormons and Film.” Read part 1 here. Get this double-sized issue at byustudies.byu.edu

One creative realm where the tensions and paradoxes of Mormon culture have provided rich material for artistic treatment is in film. The invention of the motion picture spawned in 1905 the first of what would soon be thousands of nickelodeons where short films were screened to the accompaniment of an improvising pianist.

In that first year of the new theaters, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company produced a comic short entitled A Trip to Salt Lake City, which portrayed an overwhelmed polygamous husband faced with the daunting task of giving his numerous children a piggyback ride while on a moving railway car. Humor soon turned to more virulent portrayals, however, with the 1910 Danish production of A Victim of the Mormons.

Homegrown imitations of the genre followed over the next two years, including The Mormon, Mountain Meadows Massacre, An Episode of Early Mormon Day Marriage or Death; and The Danites. The same themes readers had relished in fiction were now vividly portrayed on the screen: Church-sponsored massacres and sexual exploitation of women.

The barrage prompted the Church to enter the field with its own lavish production (by contemporary standards) of One Hundred Years of Mormonism (1912). The effort involved a cast of more than a thousand, an elaborate reconstruction of sections of Nauvoo, and four concurrently running cameras resulting in a ninety-minute spectacle. [1]

But LDS efforts to balance the record could not compete with the lurid appeal of studio potboilers, and were soon overwhelmed by a wave of harsh depictions with titles like the widely popular A Mormon Maid (1917), and Trapped by the Mormons (1922). Others carried the weight and appeal lent by the name of Zane Grey: Fox brought both his Riders of the Purple Sage and The Rainbow Trail to the screen in 1918.

As with popular fiction, the new medium of motion pictures presented itself to Mormons primarily in the guise of a weapon wielded against the faith with, alternately, slander and derision. So it is not surprising that in the formative years of those art forms, Mormons were slow to embrace them as canvasses for their own creative expression.

As the popularity of film continued unabated, its usefulness as a medium of communication grew ever more obvious. (By the Depression Era, motion pictures were the dominant mode of popular entertainment, with more than 61 percent of Americans attending a weekly show. [2] )

With the approach of the Church centennial in 1930, B. H. Roberts hoped the Church could again enter the field with its own production. He envisioned a major film based on the Book of Mormon, [3] but the project found no support among Church leadership. In the 1930s, however, the Promotion Code was adopted, which strictly prohibited the ridicule of religious denominations, their leaders, or adherents. As a consequence, Mormons seemed content to acquiesce in the kinder, gentler direction of Hollywood, typified by the star-studded Darryl F. Zanuck mega-production of Brigham Young (1940).

The Advent of Mormon Filmmaking

Only in recent years has independent Mormon filmmaking begun to come into its own, characterized by tremendous variety, talent, and energy. The Association for Mormon Letters began recognizing outstanding Mormon novels in 1980, and initiated prizes for film in 2000. The very next year, the first LDS Film Festival took place in Provo — and showcased more than seventy film entries from around the world.

Especially popular at present is the genre of Mormon comedy. One series of films, Singles Ward (2002), The R.M. (2003), and The Home Teachers (2004) consists of snappy spoofs that good-naturedly satirize Mormon culture but in ways that may be lost on non-Mormon audiences. They do show a healthy capacity for self-mockery and manage to succinctly depict a huge variety of Mormon peculiarities.

The cumulative effect, though at times rather heavy-handed, is to reveal an abundance of droll and distinctive LDS cultural markers (spare beds composed of freeze-dried food storage), cultural foibles (elaborate ice sculptures as centerpieces for thirty-minute lessons in the women’s auxiliary), and cultural vocabulary (“You’re not just an RM, you’re an LDS RM who was trained at the MTC, who became a DL, a ZL, and then an AP, who was promised long ago by his bishop through a PPI after a BYC that someday he’d be the EQP. I smell GA!”)

The coded language is a humorous yet striking sign of how fully evolved Mormonism has become as an autonomous culture not fully accessible by outsiders. But being parties to the joke, as all Mormons are, is also a comforting and exhilarating sign of insidership, like membership in a secret society.

Almost a genre unto itself is the Mormon missionary film. Stage productions (and later a video version) of Saturday’s Warrior were enormously successful in the 1970s, relying in part upon a formula that combined thwarted romance (complicated Mormon-style by birth’s veil of forgetfulness), a comic version of missionary life, and unfiltered sentimentality.

The Best Two Years (2003) reproduces this formula, mixing the humorous side of missionary culture with a sentimental depiction of one missionary’s spiritual awakening that is prompted by a nerdy but irrepressibly sincere companion. Comforting in its familiarity, sympathetic in its depiction of European missionary challenges, and ultimately faith-affirming, the work is an uncomplicated film that strikes a resonant cord with Mormon audiences.

The popularity of these comedic films seems in part to derive from a people hungry for entertainment that validates their own cultural specificity. Like insiders to a private joke, Mormons can comfortably laugh at a genre that, by its focus on culturally distinctive eccentricities, promotes Mormon cohesion and reifies and confirms Mormon self-definition, even as it sometimes exploits a cultural grammar that is inherently exclusionary. For that reason, and because the films in the missionary and comedic genres tend to rely excessively upon the subject rather than the medium for success, some in the Mormon community worry that the genres will present the potential for Mormon filmmaking in a painfully limited and limiting way.

In a serious mode, some filmmakers have gone on to celebrate Mormon history and culture. The Other Side of Heaven (2001) portrayed with light humor and spare sentimentality the true-life missionary experiences of the young John H. Groberg, who spent three years in Tonga (1954–57). Written and directed by Mitch Davis, the film was produced by Gerald Molen, who also produced the blockbusters Jurassic Park, Hook, and Schindler’s List (for which he won an Academy Award). Actual references to the Mormon faith that launched Groberg on this mission are conspicuously absent. It is not clear if such a decision is intended to universalize the message of Christian service and spiritual coming of age, or to avoid alienating a potential audience.

The Work and the Glory (2004) and its sequels go in the opposite direction by explicitly addressing the message of Mormonism as both urgent and controversial. Technically well done, the films, like the books, focus on the conflicts that both romance and religion introduce into the Steed family. Joseph Smith and Mormonism are thus presented as the context for a story whose dramatic focus allows for an indirect account of the Church’s founder and early years.

Though not produced by the Church, for all intents and purposes it could have been. Building on the popularity of the best-selling series (in Mormondom) by Gerald Lund, the film is too overtly faith-promoting and celebratory to penetrate a larger market.

One of the first makers of Mormon films to be recognized by critics as a serious artist is screenwriter, director, and actor Richard Dutcher. In his work, we begin to see efforts to plumb the paradoxes and complexities of Mormon culture, with a sophistication that literature has been manifesting since the 1940s.

God’s Army is a searingly candid depiction of missionary work and of the range of personalities that constitute a typical mission environment. With its drill-sergeant mission president, sophomoric missionary pranks, eccentric investigators, and distracting “sisters,” the film appears a starkly naturalistic depiction of themes sacred to Mormon life.

The Problem of Doubt

The dramatic focus in God’s Army is on the problem of doubt in Mormon life. It is hard enough to find space for doubt in a religious culture that asserts knowledge and certainty as a matter of course. It is virtually impossible in a missionary subculture where elders are sent forth not “to be taught, but to teach” (D&C 43:15). But in Dutcher’s missionary sextet, two elders are anything but certain.

One character, Elder Kinegar, has been studying anti-Mormon literature. He openly discusses his doubts and findings, only to be met by the other missionaries’ open hostility. As the chasm of doubt yawns wider, he is horror-struck by the possibility that he has been deceived. His wrenching exclamation — ”What if they know it’s all a big lie? ... But they won’t tell us! Damn them if it’s not true! Damn them to hell!” — is an explosion pregnant with complex meaning. His terror and vehemence are proportional to the degree of certainty and the totality of the investment he has as a believing (in other words, knowing) Latter-day Saint.

And that terror and vehemence betray the degree to which LDS testimonies are interdependent. My faith can never be a basis for your knowledge, because faith is by definition tenuous and personal and subjective. But my assertion of knowledge can be a legitimate basis for your faith, because as a declaration of certainty it makes a claim to objective truth.

Mormons are admonished to “get their own testimonies” and not live by borrowed light. But immersion in a culture so saturated in the rhetoric of certainty inevitably produces the pressure to express, if not to actually possess, personal conviction; and it produces a socially reinforced confidence about those convictions.

Perhaps this explains in part the proclivity of disaffected Mormons to so frequently react with bitterness and feelings of betrayal. It explains why people can leave the Church but cannot leave it alone.

Elder Kinegar’s travail ends at the bus station in an emotionally intense scene. When the group’s leader, “Pops” Dalton, tries to stop Kinegar from leaving, the elder-turned-apostate flings at the terminally ill Dalton a charge that is a projection of his own experience: “You are so afraid that you are just going to disappear!” That Dalton’s only response is physical violence — they scuffle briefly — suggests the charge may strike close to home.

More likely, the response simply typifies the difficulty in Mormon culture of addressing those who are doubting with cool rationality. At a minimum, Dalton’s reaction eradicates any moral high ground that he, as a believer, has vis-à-vis the other, as a doubter.

The spiritual odyssey of the protagonist, Elder Brandon Allen, threatens to duplicate the journey of the apostate. And given the banality of life in this missionary apartment and mission field, the sympathetic defection of the troubled elder, and the naturalism of the film, this would not be an unmotivated development in the plot. That is why when Allen’s spiritual awakening and subsequent conversion unfold, they do so in a context that has been disarmingly shorn of sentimentality and advocacy. Dutcher thereby manages to center spiritual realities in a fallen world, where raucous roommates rather than the Tabernacle Choir provide the choral backdrop to sacred epiphanies.

This may be the greatest accomplishment of the film — managing to naturalize the supernatural without stripping it of sublimity. Sometimes the disjunctions that get us there are dramatically intense, as when Allen ponders the meaning of having found his own path to the gospel via a pedophile stepfather. Other times, these juxtapositions take the form of lightly veiled self-irony, as when the missionaries hand out tracts to the film’s soundtrack of jaunty fiddle music and Ryan Shupe’s lyrics, “You’re gonna go to hell, I hope you look good with horns and a tail,” or when the film’s pseudo-documentary “afterward” tells us that Carla the former street hooker is now the spiritual living teacher in her ward’s Relief Society.

The result is a work that enacts filmically what Joseph’s vision encompassed theologically: a successful integration of the quotidian and the celestial. But the film also suggests that another theological pairing — intellectual openness and the quest for conviction, certainty, and searching — has a more uneasy alliance in Mormon culture.

In Dutcher’s vision, not all choices are validated, and his spiritual sympathies are clear. But they are sympathies that do not rely for their appeal upon sentimental manipulation.

States of Grace

Dutcher returned to missionary themes in 2005 with the film States of Grace. It is lamentably ironic how grace can be edged out of Mormon theology, as a consequence of the very paradoxes already mentioned. Coexisting anxiously with deference for authority and hierarchy is an LDS emphasis on individual agency and accountability so profound as to invite the charge of Pelagianism, that is, the heresy that salvation can be achieved independently of Christ through exertion of the will.

In addition, the endless questing and eternal progression exemplified by Joseph is countered by a rhetoric and doctrine of epistemological certainty so impregnable that it can preempt faith and forestall any abject reliance upon the mysterious workings of grace. Compounding this tendency is the antipathy to mystery, the frequent eclipse in Mormonism of wonder and, occasioned by Joseph’s collapse of sacred distance, an all-too comfortable commingling of the heavenly and earthly. The result is a religious culture where the status of grace is uncertain and its Author not always the thematic center of the stories Mormonism tells, in sermons or in art.

Dutcher’s project can be seen, in part, as a vigorous effort to re-center Christ and rehabilitate grace in Mormon theology, as the title of his latest movie proclaims.

States of Grace is a no-holds-barred interrogation of a challenge endemic to all organized religion, and to Mormonism in particular — how can grace operate freely in an institution as regulated, rule-governed, correlated, and orchestrated as the LDS Church? Or as the film’s Elder Lozano (Ignacio Serricchio) asks implicitly, what is the appropriate response when it seems necessary to “break the rules [in order to] keep the commandments”?

Part of the film’s beauty is in the way the humorless and dutiful Elder Farrell (Lucas Fleischer) unconsciously travels down the road that query marks, in tandem with Lozano’s more self-conscious odyssey. Lozano’s decision leads him to take into the missionaries’ apartment, in defiance of mission rules, a homeless street preacher in need of convalescence. Meanwhile, Farrell finds himself irresistibly drawn to befriend and fraternize with, also in breach of mission rules, the lonely (and lovely), hurting young woman, Holly (Rachel Emmers).

Lozano’s decision yields happy consequences, as Louis (Jo-sei Ikeda) escapes his alcoholism and finds his way to pastorship of his own church (a conspicuously non-Mormon church at that). Farrell’s decision bears agonizing fruit. In an excruciating sequence, we see him slip into sexual sin, experience devastating guilt, and attempt suicide.

Non-Mormon viewers may respond to his reaction as does Holly — with incredulity that a moral slip is experienced as a private apocalypse. Dutcher is not, presumably, questioning the seriousness with which Latter-day Saints view a sin “second only to murder” in their theology. The point is rather two-fold.

First, guilt that is inexpressibly intense must beckon forth a grace that is inexpressibly sublime. But second, guilt so extreme as to be virtually irredeemable must not be misconstrued in Mormonism as guilt that is irredeemable (as implied in the comment of Farrell’s father, better dead than unchaste). That is Farrell’s error.

Holly’s insistent gift of the crucifix necklace, which strikes the missionaries as naïvely inappropriate, becomes a symbol not of Christ’s redemptive power, but of LDS awkwardness at knowing how to receive it in non-LDS packaging. Farrell’s tragedy is contextualized by the third major plot of this movie mosaic, in which gangbanger Carl finds his way to conversion and redemption with the assistance of Lozano, whose own gang-member past gives him special empathy.

If the film has a flaw, it is this: in its zeal to celebrate the splendid and manifold intersections of grace, the film can become too conspicuous in its ecumenical utopianism — as in the scene where a Latino ex-gang member missionary, a black Pentecostal preacher, a porn actress, and a white-bread Utah missionary, all cheerily toast Jesus on the balcony of a terrace apartment overlooking the ocean.

At the same time, if there is a moral in Dutcher’s tale, it is neither facile nor sanguine. For if we have been exposed to a redemption that is miraculous and moving in the person of Carl in particular, we have also been exposed to searing pain and unconsoled grief as well. Farrell’s clasp of Holly’s hand at the end may portend their happy resolution of sin, but Carl’s conversion compounds rather than heals his pain, as the consequent murder of his young brother attests.

And in an irony that may or may not be part of Dutcher’s intent, we cannot help but realize, when all is said and done, that Farrell’s fastidiousness, if it had not been checked by the more compassionate and spontaneous Lozano, would have been his spiritual preservation. Pharisaical attention to the rules (no taking in vagrants) would have precluded the chain of events that led inexorably to his personal tragedy. Maybe “obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Sam. 15:22). But the emphasis here is clearly on the incomparable beauty of redemption, not on the hand-wringing of hindsight. That the redeemed is in this case the Mormon proselytizer is a powerful point.

Difficult Moral

The difficult moral here may be that for the spiritually superficial, the devastating taste of sin may be the precondition for true knowledge of the Christ. Of course, that presents us with another dilemma before which even the Apostle Paul could only recoil in inarticulate horror: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Rom. 6:1–2). But “God forbid” is not a complete answer. It merely confirms our frustrating incapacity to resolve rationally these troubling paradoxes.

n the face of such logical inadequacy, film can be articulate where speech cannot. That is one sense in which Dutcher’s work is indeed “sacramental cinema.” [4] In a cinematic juxtaposition influenced by the Godfather, one troublingly beautiful and sacramental scene begins as gang members walk almost ritualistically around the young boy they have just murdered. His eyes close in death at the same moment his brother Carl’s open, as Mormon elders finish baptizing and then confirming him, after which they ritualistically circle around him in a ring of newfound brotherhood.

In the film’s closing sequence, Elder Farrell watches a live manger scene. His final embrace of the Christ he has taught but never known, is literally enacted as he asks to hold the Christ child, and weeping, finds hopeful catharsis. The entire cast is assimilated into a tableau vivant. The scene comes perilously close to sentimental contrivance, but becomes instead a stylized allegory, demonstrating grace’s universal reach and power to assimilate all, saints and sinners, converters and converts, Mormons and Methodists into a story that began in Bethlehem.