Prayer figures in the earliest stories of which we have record, including The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. While sermons, songs, revivals, rituals, readings, apologetics, and polemics are all powerful genres of religious communication, prayer in many ways stands apart from these other genres. As an intuitive mode of communication, prayer can be a private or public act. Prayer harnesses unique motivations and gestures and can be spontaneous, free form, standardized, and/or ritualized while achieving personal, psychological, public, rhetorical, and/or political aims. Unsurprisingly, because of the wide variety of possibility presented by prayer, prayer continues to maintain a profound presence in stories of stage and screen today, which is the wager of Terry Lindvall's God on the Big Screen: A History of Hollywood Prayer from the Silent Era to Today.
Lindvall's book catalogs the appearance of prayer in hundreds of stories told in major Hollywood films over the last 120 years. In a dizzying array of movies, movies it would take the better part of a lifetime to watch, Lindvall illustrates the many ways the portrayal of prayer has moved along with the social and political events of the day. Movies not only reflect an image of ourselves back at us, but also have the capacity to teach us how to be, how to pray, how to worship, how to feel grace, how to experience freedom. At the same time, films can teach us how not to pray, how not to worship, how to feel hopeless, and unfree. Like any medium, films are shaped by popular ideas, and films shape popular ideas in turn. Lindvall tirelessly illustrates the many facets of movie prayers in such disparate works as The Birth of a Nation (1915), The African Queen (1951), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Shadowlands (1993), and Talladega Nights (2006). As just that short selection shows, the scope, intention, and rhetoric of different films, including their atmosphere, their seriousness, and their historical moment, vary widely and deeply. That variance of course affects the work that prayer can do and does across these different films and different times.
Lindvall's central claim is that we learn visually from film and that films, even so-called secular films, contain theologies that are, on occasion, “more religiously attuned than many church activities” (3). Moreover, Lindvall shows us how pervasive prayer is in film. He proves this point over and over again through eight chapters, each of which covers a decade or two of Hollywood films, beginning with the silent film era of the early twentieth century and ending with films from the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The pervasiveness of prayer in films is one of the more astonishing contributions of this work. The examples are so plentiful and so varied that one cannot help but wonder how much of our social imaginary about prayer life is shaped by film. At the same time, Lindvall is keen to show that the prayers that show up in films are influenced strongly by events that are happening in the nation, including the World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam War, Watergate, and September 11th. At the same time, prayers central to the storyline show up in films about sport, including Rocky (1976), Chariots of Fire (1981), and Hoosiers (1986), as well as in comedies as disparate as Car Wash (1976), Coming to America (1988), and Bruce Almighty (2003). In each case, prayer can function in a wide variety of ways, from echoing “the cant of many televangelists” (220) to pleading with fairy godmother (232), from dramatic prayers reflecting “the honest grappling of many for spiritual renewal” (237) to prayers of families challenging “the authority of institutional religion” (259).
Lindvall is correct that films must be placed in their historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood, and this work makes a solid contribution to that effort as it relates to the ubiquity of prayer in Hollywood films and the way these prayers influence and are influenced by wider social, political, and historical events. Lindvall illustrates well the “diversity of prayer types and praying agents” in Hollywood films, including prayers that “confess, give thanks, or make desperate supplication” (326). On occasion throughout the book, the examples come at the reader too quickly and land only as hints of films that might deserve a second look. At other times, Lindvall gives some films the time they deserve in order to truly weigh the power of prayer as a force for influencing culture. This is illustrated by his masterful treatments of Luke's Garden of Gethsemane moment in Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Salieri's prayers in Amadeus (1984). As a book that tries to cover 120 years of Hollywood films in one go, God on the Big Screen does a lot and can spare little on in-depth analysis of specific films. At the same time, it does succeed in providing a solid overview of a wide variety of prayers in a wide variety of films. The book will be useful in both undergraduate and graduate classes that treat religion in popular culture as well as for scholars who want to understand better the treatment of prayer in the mass media.
Scholars will need to wrestle further with the centrality of Christian and especially Protestant forms of prayer at work in Hollywood films. Lindvall convincingly shows that films contain theologies, but more work will need to be done on specific films to figure out just what theology looks like in movies and what effect it has on wider cultures and publics. Is there a “Hollywood theology” that can be understood as operating across time? Lindvall acknowledges in a note that “uniquely Jewish prayers deserve another book,” and it is certain he would also agree that the same could be said about prayers in films that fall outside the Hollywood marquee (339). The focus on Hollywood films, of course, means that some of the greatest prayers in American movies go unacknowledged, such as the prayer as dialogue, primal scream, and song that powerfully concludes 1998's Native American film Smoke Signals. One can easily imagine after reading God on the Big Screen that we yet need books about Salah in Islamic film and Hindi prayers in Bollywood. Lindvall's work is a contribution toward those eventualities. By helping us see the ubiquity and the cultural power of prayer in Hollywood films, Lindvall opens doors and windows for the further exploration of different genres of religious communication in the movies of other nations and countries.
