I recently finished a draft of a screenplay for a short film on the roles of men and women in marriage. (We’re doing it for a family ministry to use in a new curriculum they’re developing.) One of their ideas was to use dancing as a metaphor for roles in marriage. I thought it was a good idea, so I tried to build the entire story around it. I set it in a ballroom dancing class for adults, and the more I pushed the metaphor, the better it seemed to work. By the end, it had become a multi-dimensional (if simple) exploration of the roles of men and women in relationships, including some of the ups and downs that go with them. What I did wasn’t anything new – it’s a method as old as literature – but I think it could be a useful approach to dimensionalizing complex and potentially abstract ideas in film. In literary terms, it’s called a conceit.
I met my first conceit in a British literature class. If you clicked on the link above, you saw that Wikipedia does a nice job explaining that a conceit is “an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.” The poet John Donne was a master at using clever conceits to explore unexpected ideas; in one of my favorite poems he simultaneously compares 1) his departure and return on a journey, 2) his and his wife’s marital love, and 3) their conjoined souls to a draftsman’s compass. (There’s a good reason this poetry was called metaphysical.)
The use of conceit in a film, however, does not have to be so complex. The first step seems to be finding the right metaphor that can be pushed and pulled in different directions, but still maintain its basic structure. The visual nature of film makes it possible to play out the metaphor in fun and interesting ways. If the audience understands the comparison beforehand, the film can run along two tracks simultaneously; if not, then the film can still run smoothly on the single track of the story.
Following our train analogy, it is possible to keep one of the parallel tracks hidden the entire time and still have a working conceit. However, I think it’s more interesting to let the second track (in this case, the marital relationship that is being compared with dancing) to emerge in the story thereby providing more nuanced commentary on what the metaphor is arguing. After all, even a good metaphor can only go so far, and there is a point at which the comparison track (dancing) runs openly beside the main subject track (marriage roles), and the story simultaneously follows both.
This is actually simpler in practice than it sounds. For instance, in the actual screenplay we see couples at different stages in their relationships take a dance class together, thereby showing relationally what is being compared in their actual actions on the dance floor.
I think this method could be used to an even greater extent to explore theology in film. In one respect, this is what Geerhardos Vos says that God is doing through redemptive history in the Bible. In his sermon on the encounter between Jesus and Zacchaeus, he says: “Neither this nor any other occurrence in the gospel history was a casual thing. It is true, these days of our Lord’s flesh which he lived among his countrymen, acting and acted upon, were a real concrete piece of life interwoven with the life of Israel. They belong to that age and generation as truly as any section of human history can be said to belong to the times in which it happened. But it is also true that this is not common history, but sacred, redemptive history, which means that there runs through it, from beginning to end, a special design, ordering its course, shaping its frame, and fixing its issues, so as to make of it a proper stage for the enactment of the great mystery of redemption, whose spectators and participants were not merely the Jews of that age but the inhabitants of all subsequent ages.”
I think this “special design” is a fascinating concept, and although I sometimes have a hard time wrapping my mind about just how it could work, it seems a good direction in which Christian film could move. It encourages a simultaneity of purposes that creates parallel and yet interconnected tracks of meaning, together deepening the connections of a story with life and theology. Furthermore, I think it’s possible to do this not only with two tracks, but even more, if they are carefully chosen and laid neatly beside one another. Some of these tracks could appear and disappear throughout a story, as if going around mountains or through tunnels, but their presence would always strengthen and nuance those running next to it.
Which brings me to a final observation that may be helpful: the commentary for the metaphor likely needs to be bound up inside the film, or at least needs to be provided in a context outside the film by which the audience can be made aware of the comparison (such as in a class with a piece of curriculum). Allen Tate gets at this in his poem The Meaning of Life when he talks about balancing the two weights of essence and commentary, “lest the first smother the second, [or] the second be speechless (without the first).”
Now this all may seem too academic, but I hope it’s not to those Christian writers and filmmakers interested in trying to do more than just exploit premillennial eschatology or tell a one-track conversion story. Not that these are inherently bad, but it seems to me that the authentic Christian life and the world-encompassing scriptural revelation are extremely complex, and therefore require a more complex method of engagement in order to be true to their structure. This method could potentially look through a glass darkly and see face-t0-face at the same time.
And if you didn’t think I was conceited before, surely you do now.
