the priceless lunatic
by
Douglas Messerli
Bill
C. Davis (screenplay, based on his own play), Glenn Jordan (director) Mass
Appeal / 1984
I come from a church-going family. Both my mother and father were Elders in their local Presbyterian church (the ecclesiastical equivalent of the local version of the US government’s Congress) and two of my mother’s male siblings became ministers, one Presbyterian and the other Methodist—which might suggest something about the Lutheran Church in which they grew up. As the first born child in a family which would eventually produce something like 36 first cousins, I used the bannister of my grandmother’s staircase as a pulpit where I pretended to sermonize at family gatherings to the joy and laughter of several aunts and uncles. I dreamed of becoming a missionary—not because, I soon realized, I had any desire to spread religious doctrine but rather because I imagined it as an opportunity to travel to all sorts of exotic places throughout the world. I still love to travel, although long voyages no longer love me.
My parents were not particularly
religiously-inclined in our home, but we did attend church nearly every Sunday,
and I sang throughout my high-school years in the church choir. Even during my
first couple of years of college I continued to attend the campus religious
center because I loved to sing chorale music and had a fairly-well trained
tenor voice, participating in university chorale groups as well. But I had long
since lost all interest in the sermons and other aspects of the service.
Ministers, I had concluded, spoke a language to their congregations that
invoked clichéd words of consolation and repeated moral homilies that had long
ago lost any real meaning. I was convinced that many students had delivered
better talks in my Speech 101 class. And soon after, when I realized finally
that I no longer shared any of my fellow attendees’ religious beliefs, I
stopped church-going altogether. As a humanist agnostic I have never since
entered a church except for weddings and funerals.
Last night while I
was thinking about our three C’s series [Current
Crises in
Catholicism]...and I fell asleep. No, I was straining over the
most recent crisis
that has faced our church today. and consequently
I dreamed that Bette
Davis was ordained a priest. ...Of course I
remember when the
big moral question was should we chew the
host or let it melt in our mouths.
Meanwhile, a young man (Željko Ivanek) on
his daily jog through the neighborhood who has dropped into Father Farley’s
sermon turns the priest’s comedic toying on its head by pushing the priest’s postulations
into a straight-forward challenge: “What do you think of women becoming
priests?” Once more Farley attempts to deflect the question at the heart of his
moral dialogue: “What do I think....I wouldn’t want to sway anybody’s
viewpoint, so I’ll plead the fifth.”
Farley’s nasty response summarizes his anger
for this stranger having upstaged his act (which is later compared by the same
man as being somewhat like a nightclub comedy routine): “You really should
invest in a portable pulpit.”
So we recognize in this interchange that beneath
whatever large tale this story might wish to tell, the real focus of Mass
Appeal is the crisis soon to be faced by this popular priest, who, after
some bitter times, worked hard to transform himself into someone his parishioners
love through white lies, pleasant banter, “stupid” consolation (Farley’s own
words, arguing “Consolation should stupid. That way a person in grief can
realize how inconsolable their grief really is.”), equivocation, and escape
(often through the wine he regularly consumes in his church office, giving
Lemmon an opportunity at moments to reprise his role in Days of Wine and
Roses).
But before that issue, the Monsignor has
called a meeting to discuss the fate of two other soon-to-be deacons, good friends
of Dolson’s, who are suspected of having a homosexual relationship. We never
meet these seminarians, nor are we given any evidence of their relationship
(although Dolson does attempt to defend them by suggesting that Christ may have
had a “loving” relationship with John), but we are assured that, when ordained,
they were committed to living celibate lives.
One is tempted, obviously, to wonder how
a church that has so long hidden and supported hundreds of gay men who later
abused children could be so troubled about a possible homosexual affair between
the two grown students studying to become priests. But that, in fact, may
explain, in part, Burke’s position; he cannot abide any sexuality to exist
within the confines of the church, which anyone might argue is at the heart of
the problem with which the Roman Catholic Church is faced. People are born (a
religious person might say “created) as sexual beings; and despite church
desires, people are seldom saints. To deny them any sexual expression is a kind
of sin of omission one well might argue.
Yet, Jordan and Davis’ film, in the
manner of the glib priest Farley, makes no attempt to truly explore these
issues, instead putting any more level-headed considerations in the mouths of
the ineffectual Farley and the rabidly righteous Dolson. as, against his
inclinations, the Monsignor allows Dolson to become a Deacon on the condition
that Farley make him over within the small time-frame of one month.
Indeed the film turns its full attention,
soon after the presumably gay seminarians’ dismissal, to the interchanges
between the older and younger, affable and irascible opponents, Farley and Dolson.
At first it appears to be a study in annoyance, as each of the two refuses to
bow to the other’s demands; but obviously in such a structural set-up we know
that both men will gradually discover values in the other from which they can
benefit. From the beginning the more experienced Farley perceives Dolson as a “priceless
lunatic” which, he argues, the Church needs in order to survive, while
recognizing that such lunatics have little ability to sustain their own
survival.
Farley attempts to re-frame and refine a
written sermon that Dolson has created, explaining the tactics of delivery and
strategies of communication: when the listeners begin to cough, he warns his pupil,
it is a sign that the sermon is not going well. Dolson’s first sermon results
in nearly a contagion of coughers and hackers, but instead of retreating he moves
frighteningly forward with passages that Farley had previously asked him to
cut. The result is a near revolt from Farley’s parishioners with complaints
filed to Burke.
The intolerant Monsignor now suspects
that in his support of and friendship with the two expelled seminarians, Dolson
himself might be gay, in short arguing not just without evidence but positing
guilt simply by association. Finally, Farley is forced to recognize the
injustice of the situation, the priest, in turn, indirectly confessing to his disciple
that as a child he had been beaten by his father who left his family, his
mother remarrying a man he hated which resulted in his inability to show his mother
any love until, to late for him to express it, she died.
For his part, Dolson admits that before
he entered the seminary he had explored love with both sexes, but unable to find
the kind love he was seeking took refuge in his commitment to the God.
Both men, in short, have failed in
love. And Farley gives the young man an opportunity to explore that topic in a
final sermon in his church which he believes will convince both his congregation
and the Monsignor of Dolson’s abilities.
The sermon—in which the young Deacon
reveals his failure for having lost the ability to hear the voices of those to
whom he most sought to speak, namely the audience to whom he is presently presenting
his message—is finally a successful one, with many of Farley’s congregation highly
evaluating it, proof Farley believes that will convince Burke to change his
mind.
But it is already too late. Ignoring his
mentor’s advice to keep his previous explorations of love a secret, the naive “lunatic”
openly tells Dolson that he has had sex with both men and women.
By the time that Farley helps him to
perceive that he has sealed his own fate but possibly endangered Farley’s own future
in the parish he loves, Dolson has returned to his seminary bedroom to pack up
his clothes, another victim of the Monsignor’s and perhaps the Church’s
homophobia.
Visiting him in that room, Farley
admits that he has been ineffectual because of his inability to give up what he
has worked all his life to achieve, being loved and admired. “I need them,” he
admits. “I really do.” Dolson assures him that he truly understands and consoles
him (not so different from Farley’s own attempts at consolation) that he will
find another place where they might take him—perhaps even in Iowa, the standing
joke that Farley has made about where Monsignor Burke may relocate him.
Actually, Iowa, my home state, might be a good place for an outspoken lunatic
like Dolson; maybe he might convince younger versions of me that religion is
not simply a dangerous farce.
As a wizened, hopefully wiser old queer,
I can only wish that all the Dolsons might return to the everyday human race to
search out the love they never found. If the church is in need of such “priceless”
lunatics so are our secular cities and towns.
If nothing else, this young runner has
jogged some sense into his head: “During those 3 years [when he was exploring
love] whenever I was with someone I loved loved me, I did everything I could to
keep it constant. Bit by bit I learned all the rules. What to say, what to
give, what to withhold so I could keep that love constant. ....I found out that
the constant was up to me. Promises are broken. Friends will be fickle and love
goes its own course. And all of it has to finally not matter. [Shifting the
conversation to the priest] What you believe has got to be more important than
what your congregation thinks of you.”
The problem lies, as Farley reiterates,
in knowing what you believe.
I believe this well-meaning film is not
as profound as it believes itself to be.
Los Angeles, January 11, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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