Greta Gerwig has been having an amazing year with the success of Barbie, but her most enduring contribution to the world of cinema thus far remains her debut film, Lady Bird. If you run in social circles where lots of people have seen the film, then you’ve likely heard people reference the scene in which Saoirse Ronan’s Christine discusses her essay about Sacramento with Lois Smith’s kindly nun, Sister Sarah-Joan. Christine waves off Sarah-Joan’s observation of her love for her hometown, saying that she’s just been paying attention to it. The nun gently persists, suggesting that the simple act of paying close attention to something is the same thing as loving it.
One of the great things about art is that it allows us to practice this sort of attentiveness, and to do so in contexts outside our comfortable circles of friends and family. We pause our lives for just a while to pay attention to something that another human being created: in its own small way an act of charity (in the “Catholic theological virtue” sense). At its most basic level, this is all we do at Seeing & Believing. We pay attention to the film and television that we encounter, then articulate what we see.
It sounds simple enough, though the cultural criticism coming out of contemporary American Christianity has often struggled to do it. In these spheres, forthright engagement with a work of art on its own terms tends to take a back seat to other considerations. Some outlets offer context-free enumerations of sex scenes and swear words, dismissing any work that falls afoul of an extremely narrow standard. Others favor an approach that contorts a work into a glorified sermon illustration, in which theme, character, and technique are of interest only inasmuch as they can be made to fit a thesis statement about God, faith, or ethics. However laudable their intentions may be, both approaches evince a utilitarian view of art that reduces art to a simple vessel for ideology, an aquarium where propositions reside.
As a podcast, Seeing & Believing took a different tack, which we plan to carry over into this new project on Substack. (Thanks for reading/subscribing, by the way!) We are uninterested in imposing an ill-fitting ideological rubric onto the films and television we write about. Nor do we want to use those films or TV as a simple pretext for indulging our own personal hobbyhorses. One of our critical lodestars is thoughtful curiosity about what a film is trying to be and do. By paying close attention, we hope to discern how it helps the world grow (or how it fails to do anything of the sort) and maybe grow a little ourselves in the process. Hopefully, the writing that comes out of this pursuit inspires something similar in you, too.
We like to think that we’ve been well served by aiming for this target over the years, though the nice thing about the whole pursuit is that success or failure is of secondary importance. Attentive engagement with art is a discipline, and the purpose of a discipline isn’t to reach a definitive endpoint so that you can stop. The doing is its own reward; it helps you draw nearer to something inside yourself that cannot be approached in any other way. Over on his own Substack (which, by the way, is excellent and you should subscribe to it), essayist Phil Christman unpacks how this works with literature, though the same principles apply to the cinematic image:
I think that each human mind is irreducibly strange, that the gesamkunstwerk (movie/opera/soundscape/running monologue/vague series of colors and lights) that each mind assembles from moment to moment is inexhaustible and as particular as fingerprints are supposed to be (though it turns out the science on fingerprints isn’t foolproof). When we learn to use language — which is an inherently small-c conservative, compromising medium, where your experience of “blue” or “chair” or “hope” and my experience of “blue” or “chair” or “hope” get sanded down to something we can both refer to — we also learn to smother this ongoing artwork that is consciousness in a series of cliches, vague summaries, and good-enough verbal compromises. “I fell in love.” “I lost my mother.” “I was depressed.” There isn’t anything to regret in this fact; it makes social life possible. When we write artfully, we try to go beneath all that summary language to catch one or two of the strange details or almost-instantaneous micro-perceptions that they sit atop. There’s a permafrost of cliche, and we try to go deeply enough into an experience to catch a bit of what wriggles underneath it, and also the stock details that other writers have already captured and mined. Because the mind, the world, the self are all incredibly strange things, there is always a little more detail to capture, and writers can keep “making it new.”
I like Christman’s bit about the gesamkunstwerk (I have a thing for expansive German nouns, leave me alone) because visual media like cinema are uniquely effective at evoking that subarticulate texture of another person’s lived experience. The things that other people love, fear, covet, scrutinize—people can tell you about these things, of course, but through cinema they can make you feel them. The films that try to do this are gifts, and extending charitable attention toward them is our way of gratefully accepting those gifts. For Sarah and me, part of this discipline also involves writing about the experience. The resulting reviews and short essays that we offer in this space are, in turn, our own little gift to you. We hope you like it.