10 minutes with ... Colleen McDannell

By SHONA CRABTREE Religion News Service

From “The Godfather Trilogy” to “The Exorcist” to “The Passion of the Christ,” Catholic themes have long been mined by Hollywood.

Colleen McDannell, professor of history and religious studies at the University of Utah, is the editor of the recently published Catholics in the Movies, a collection of academic essays that maintains that Catholicism, with its visual nature, ritual and authority, is a natural fit for the big screen. The book also looks at how Catholicism is represented in the movies. (This interview has been edited for length.)

Q: The book’s central premise is that “at the movies, Catholicism -- rather than Protestantism -- is the American religion.” How so?
A: Catholicism is a profoundly visual religion, it has a long history and it has a hierarchical order. And so it’s easy to use Catholicism as a shorthand for Christianity in general. It lends itself perhaps more than Protestantism to visual representation.

Q: What is it about Catholicism specifically that lends itself so well to film?
A: It has a long history, so you can pick whichever era you want to explore. It has a great diversity of theology and ritual, so you can also pick and choose from that. In the United States, it has a long ethnic history, so it can also be used both to talk about insiders and outsiders at the same time. It can convey a lot of information in a short period of time.

Q: When you say it can talk about insiders and outsiders at the same time, what do you mean by that?
A: If you look at the Irish and Irish-Americans and Irish-American Catholicism, on the one hand they’re positioned as outside of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant power networks. And yet within it, they also possess some of the quintessential characteristics of being American. They’re the little guy, they’re independent, they’re always fighting against big power systems, they have a sense of good humor. They are simultaneously insiders and outsiders.

Q: A hundred years ago, Catholics were a mostly poor, mostly immigrant minority. Yet between the 1930s and the 1960s, they grew to control Hollywood’s Production Code. How did that happen?
A: Around the turn of the century and into the early 20th century, Protestants, who had been the guardians and definers of morality in the United States, began to have internal squabbles about their relationship with the modern world ... . So they lost some of their political power because they did not present a united front. In the meantime, the Catholic Church continued to become a much more powerful and a much more centralized organization, especially in the cities. They had a very clear sense of how life should be led. And they also had a very sophisticated understanding of representation because of Catholicism’s long involvement with the arts. They realized how important a visual representation was, and how important it would be then to control what people saw.

Q: How did you pick the movies for the book?
A: We wanted to pick movies that, for the most part, were made in the United States, that were easily accessible on DVD, that spanned different periods of time and reflected the diversity of Catholic life. So we wanted to have some that dealt with Irish immigrants, with women, with issues of race and class. But most of all, we wanted people to recognize and say, “Oh yeah, I know that movie, I remember that movie.”

Q: What’s your favorite movie about Catholics and why?
A: Well, I’m prejudiced because I wrote two of the essays. So it’s hard for me to say. I wrote on “The Exorcist” and “The Passion of the Christ,” which were really significant movies for American culture. But whenever you work on something, you always fall in love with it.

Q: You say that the movies contribute more to America’s common “biblical language” than the Bible. Why is that?
A: When you make a movie, you’re trying to grab someone’s emotion; that’s the whole point of a film -- to communicate on a very basic level. There are movies that are intellectual and designed to intrigue our higher intellectual activities. But for the most part, movies grab us on pretty basic levels ... Plus we don’t read, we go to movies, we watch things on DVDs. As Americans, we’re a profoundly visual culture.

Q: Where do you see Catholics in film going in this coming century?
A: I think Catholicism will still be the easy shortcut for mystery and the supernatural and the gothic. It will still be key for making horror movies that if you want to have something creepy, you have it take place in a gothic church that has Catholic overtones. We’re going to continue to have moviemakers who have a light touch when it comes to religion. I don’t think you’re going to see feature films about child abuse, and I don’t think you’re going to have hard-hitting dramas about religion. On the other hand, I think people who are religious filmmakers and producers will continue to explore religious themes -- some of the big questions, like who are we? And what about redemption and sin and some of these issues that are more pressing.