nuns in the movies (a few notes)

By alice | July 23, 2009

sister-wendy-beckett-caravan

my favourite nun- Sister Wendy Beckett

“Fun with nuns”, from the New Yorker, reads like your typical anti-Hollywood tale of a simple honest scriptwriter being screwed over by unnaturally cheerful Disney executives who murder everything good in their path by slapping a happy ending over it, because money always beats reality (ah, if only being a great big lying hypocrite really was enough to make one rich… but I digress). There are some interesting anecdotes about nun research in the piece, which made me wonder… if they were true? Would a nun really swear at a TV show that was failing to show her current soap clearly? I have no idea. And why is the trivial life of nuns so fascinating anyway? Maybe you don’t care about nuns, but the movies certainly does, which is no doubt why “Sister Act” was a hit even though Paul Rudnick refused to lend his name to its travesty of his original script.

Monks are nowhere near as interesting as women who reject male company in order to be married to God(!), of course. When writing “Sister Act”, Mr Rudnick was hoping to subvert the more respectable tradition of nuns in movies like “The Sound of Music” etc, but I think he was missing the point in trying to “subvert the Catholic church”; subversion is almost always the whole point of nuns in movies. Two Mules for Sister Sara was made in 1970 for instance, and hinges on the sexual tension between the nun and Clint Eastwood, and nearly all nun comedy is about nuns being bad or “bad”, and seems very subversive if you notice it, many years before “Sister Act”.

But subversiveness depends on where your boundaries lie. It often works best when the people being satirised are not in on the joke, which means the joke is done in subtle, clever ways. Double entendre rather than single entendre, perhaps- not very Brüno. Some people feel that subversion of ideas must upset the victims, or it isn’t working- that’s where the change begins, right? But maybe the change doesn’t begin in the extreme examples you are mocking, perhaps it’s in the attitudes of those who accept passively from outside- doing nothing in order that evil may conquer, so to speak.

Then there is my current favourite nun film, Pedro Almodóvar’s Dark Habits, in which the opposite is achieved- the Catholic church is mercilessly satirised in more extreme ways than I can even imagine seeing outside of a horror movie, and yet the nuns are also good as well as human, and the viewer ends up seeing the world from their point of view and actually learning something. I doubt very much that the Pope (or many Roman Catholics) would agree with me that Almodóvar is presenting Catholicism in a positive light in this film, in fact I’m not sure whether Almodóvar himself sees it that way, but to me, writing about a bunch of nuns who are spiritually sincere and devout as well as reasonable, kind, intelligent, flawed, eccentric and creative human beings is hardly a criticism of the religious body they all belong to… even though drug-taking, romantic passions and slap-bass guitar all appear in the convent as well. Only Almodóvar could do that in a film, and you need to be open-minded and willing to suspend your prejudices to immerse in this one, but I think it genuinely works.

The idea of the convent as a sort of female sanctuary where women who don’t fit the oppressive requirements of outside society is very ancient, and in some ways historically truthful. It also comes up in this novel by Sarah Dunant which I read recently. It seems that as society becomes more liberal, the nunnery is needed less and less, and the numbers of women who join goes down every year. Maybe what we need next is comedy films about similarly black-draped fundamentalist religious women that subvert some other religion. Or is that as frightening to consider attempting as it would have been to argue with the Spanish Inquisition? I think it will happen eventually. And I wonder if Sacha Baron-Cohen will be the man to do it…

1 Comment »

One Response to “nuns in the movies (a few notes)”

Theocritus Says:
July 26th, 2009 at 12:40 am

One of your very best posts.