A HIDDEN LIFE IN PLAIN SIGHT - Seth Wispelwey
I’ve seen Terrence Malick’s new film A Hidden Life three times now. That’s nine hours of my life in a dark theater soaking in a largely dialogue-free, impressionistically plotted movie that was only released a month ago. Those three times won’t be the last.
Written and directed in Malick’s lyrical, searching, near-spontaneous visual style, A Hidden Life documents the true story of Austrian farmer’s Franz Jägerstätter refusal to swear loyalty to Hitler when conscripted by the Third Reich for military duty. Rich in period detail and mourning for a very particular paradise lost, it reaches us now as a rapturous antidote to the death-dealing narratives of Empire in any age.
Full disclosure: I am a Malick partisan, but in a still-new 2020, I find in A Hidden Life a document that, underneath pastoral settings and pace, bristles with contextual and contemporary urgency.
Some prominent critics, while not outright hating it, have taken pointed issue with a perceived lack of insight from the film into Jägerstätter’s motivation for refusing loyalty to Hitler. These responses are both baffling and telling.
Viewers claiming to want more neon lights on Malick’s depiction of Franz’s isolated resistance in the town of St. Radegund are baffling to me because the first seventy-five plus minutes of A Hidden Life are rife with visual cues and conversation that ground Jägerstätter’s anti-fascist resolve vis à vis the Nazis and his resistance to warmongering in general.
We observe and understand his vocation as a farmer and a community member in the cultivation of life, growth, and relationship.
We observe his and his wife Franziska’s commitment to cultivating love and life between each other and with their children.
We observe his active wrestling with and call to live out his (Christian) faith authentically.
The examples the film offers up are too numerous to unpack here (and I don’t want to give away every detail if you haven’t seen it yet!). However, I think of the guideposts the film offers to Franz’s journey in the sympathetic neighbors who ask of their fellow Austrians: “Do they not know evil when they see it?” Or the moment when Franz is compelled – in a movement that seems to catch him by surprise in the moment – to stop and take in a signpost icon of a crucified Christ on the side of the path to his village.
Most striking to me in the raison d’être Malick gives for Jägerstätter’s faithful, clear-eyed struggle to hold to his convictions is the conversation he has with the elderly man refurbishing the religious art in the church Franz also volunteers in. Here the film underscores centuries of context for why many have chosen passivity or allegiance when fascism tests our imperative to love one another and wage peace.
The church artist laments his own cowardice. He read and knows what Jesus lived, taught, and died for, but won’t risk his livelihood by straying from depicting what he calls the “comfortable Christ.” The artist’s confession seems to come from an almost involuntary place – why is he pouring all of this out to Franz? He is both sensing and fortifying Franz’s resolve. Jägerstätter knows who Jesus Christ is for him and humanity, and that to claim a living relationship with the ministry that Jesus walked, talked, and died for with any seriousness lays claim on our lives.
But in The New York Times, A.O. Scott finds it “frustrating” that the “mystery” of A Hidden Life, ergo its contemporary “lesson” is absent. He asks “Why, of all the people in St. Radegund, was he alone willing to defy fascism, to see through its appeal to the core of its immorality?” And in The New Yorker, Richard Brody uses his review to launch a personal appeal for a moratorium on cinematic Nazi depictions, bemoaning what he sees as a lazy metaphor for evil that extracts no meaning for viewers anymore. (But in A Hidden Life, the events (and Nazis) actually happened!)
I think what these re/viewers find confusing is that A Hidden Life presupposes and centers a (white) man who knows that Hitler is anti-Christ and wrong and…actually acts accordingly. Peer pressure and the war machine get their due in the film, but Franz’s torment and conviction is the locus of drama (and historical fact!).
We can very safely assume that these re/viewers agree with Franz’s conviction in A Hidden Life and this is where my bafflement finds their responses telling. Perhaps their response is rooted in humility or shame that they know they wouldn’t have had the courage to follow through like Jägerstätter. That’s certainly possible. Most didn’t. Most wouldn’t.
However, re/viewer’s don’t need a Master’s degree in Christian theology or the specific faith identity of Franz to gain the insights Malick clearly offers to all throughout A Hidden Life. What’s telling about the responses that want more of Franz’s “justification” for Nazi-resistance is where they locate the re/viewer’s presuppositions.
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Because being against the Nazis is so ‘obvious,’ viewers who agree with Jägerstätter’s stance should only need to ask themselves why and whether they would have done the same! The film frames Franz’s posture and motivations clearly. To ask A Hidden Life for more insight into the [check’s notes]…Nazi resister’s motivation...is to presuppose the status quo of all those who didn’t do the self-evident ‘obvious’ thing and resist the Nazis and look for absolution that isn’t coming.
So many (white) people to think they would have actively resisted chattel slavery, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, or denounced the white supremacists who attacked Charlottesville in the summer of 2017, and so on. No they wouldn’t have. We have plentiful living proof. A Hidden Life knows Franz’s act is historically remarkable, even as it gently highlights how ‘unremarkable’ his life is. To ask “why was he so remarkable” stems from a common distancing effort we see when folks want to elevate to ‘precious’ status a chosen few in order to avoid calling their own bluff on their own ostensible convictions. (For example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was just planning on pastoring a Black Baptist church in segregated Montgomery, and through that cosmic blend of his call, context and circumstance, was catapulted into the leadership of what became the transformational Montgomery Bus Boycott, and onto the national stage.)
No wonder some re/viewers are left feeling bereft. A Hidden Life isn’t interested in putting Franz Jägerstätter on a pedestal and over-explaining his particularity for the sake of deification (though again, the reasons given are clearly mapped). Instead, it asks us all a much more radical and uncomfortable question: If Franz is this ‘unremarkable’ and yet convincingly does a remarkable thing (in part comparatively so, because so few joined him after the Anschluss), then what are you/we waiting for? What are our lives missing that prevent us from acting in accordance with Franz (who we agree with), especially now?
Brody also writes: “Every shot represents a descriptive line in a screenplay rather than a free observation or a distillation of inner experience ; each image checks off predetermined points rather than effecting discoveries.”
To which I reply: How telling!
If we find this clearly charted historical biography of a man and his family resisting Nazis lacking in motive, it only underscores how those discoveries most needing “effecting” are internal – which in turn makes A Hidden Life that much more valuable an object for wrestling with.
Bountiful ink has been spilled over decades unpacking why so many people ‘went along’ with Nazism, fascist regimes, genocide, war, and more. What we don’t get much of are films like A Hidden Life that center the kind of person we need more of and all have the power to become. Movies that don’t hold our hand and yet paint a crystal clear picture all at once.
In this way, A Hidden Life reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Whether or not you grew up in a church, chances are you at least heard the doctrine that Jesus was embodied as “Fully God and Fully Human (or as I did, more patriarchally – Fully Man).” And if we’re honest, the “hu/man” part always got subsumed under the God part when it wasn’t wielded to underscore it. That is, we were told, “Jesus is supposed to be God, and anything that doesn’t lead you to this conclusion is bankrupt.” Woof.
What I love about Scorsese’s film is that it positions and presupposes Jesus as human first and in so doing takes the call he (in Willem Dafoe’s captivating performance) hears from the living God and the claims it lays on him that much more seriously and therefore exhilaratingly. The life-giving and subversive and empire-threatening way of Jesus feels navigated in real time, bodily and urgently. His life and death isn’t retroactively programmed into a creed or an equation for us to accept to be “saved.”
It’s telling that The Last Temptation of Christ was protested in the streets before it was even released. Much of what passes for Christianity has inducted its adherents into loving a “comfortable Christ” to give us a spiritual back rub we’re on the sin-confession-forgiveness hamster wheel, not one who threatens the death-dealing spiritualities of Empire by loving the “wrong” crowd, hanging out with them, and scandalizing the puritans and fascists of his day.
Similarly, we may want Jägerstätter ‘better explained’ to us so that we can keep him ‘apart.’ Special. And he was. But only in part because more didn’t join him, even if they agreed with him. Therein lies our challenge as re/viewers of A Hidden Life: what’s stopping us, now (not just Austrians, then) from joining in, whatever the cost?
Here it’s personal: Those of us who felt a call to nonviolently confront the people who planned and brought violence in the summer of 2017 in Charlottesville experienced what Franz did from his ostensible community. On that occasion, we faced the militant expression of the idea that some lives are worth more than others, rooted in the ideology of white supremacy. Pastors who love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fifty-one weeks of the year sounded like the eight Alabama clergymen that King was responding to from a Birmingham jail when the Nazis actually came to town and the stakes couldn’t have been higher for embodying our ostensible values in real time. The senior, predominantly white, Christian and male faith leaders in Charlottesville in 2017 sounded almost verbatim like the prominent faith leaders from Birmingham in 1963 who contested that confronting hate and injustice in the streets incited violence, and that order and change should come via reliance on existing power structures of civic leadership and law enforcement.
In sum, to find A Hidden Life lacking in core ‘answer’ is to miss the point, perhaps willfully, and distance oneself from the participation Malick seeks in letting this (true) story wash through us. We are asked, as viewers who have for the most part not risked what Franz did, for an un/remarkable perspective shift, so we might be similarly shaken and convicted.
A Hidden Life asks us, here and now, to embody the remarkable until it becomes unremarkable. To pray with our feet, collectively, whoever you worship. To know our ‘why’ when fascism is at the gate, and what we’re going to do about it. And to build the muscles we need, spiritual and physical, to live out our (anti-fascist) convictions.
As Jeff Reichert says in his review of the film published on Reverse Shot: “To find Franz’s dissent enigmatic is to let oneself be limited by the bounds of conventional dramaturgical rules and to ignore the plethora of visual evidence Malick supplies to clarify why it is impossible for Franz to act in any other way…A courageous moral act need not be immediately efficacious to produce meaningful impact. Franz’s calm certitude in his decision, arrived at through faith, personal reflection, and individual experience, poses a challenge to all those around him [my own note: us!], especially those who’ve decided for various reasons to align themselves with the forces of nationalism.”
In the end, we see the fruits of Franz’s action in the lives of his neighbors and loved ones. There’s repentance, mourning, and new life cultivated in the wake of his ultimately unwavering fulfillment of anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, truly Christian integrity.
Ask not what makes him special. Ask instead why we don’t join in the struggle to fulfill what he did when we know it’s right. The more who do, the more transformation we’ll actualize. Be transformed to transform, together. Then bear fruit.
Or in a much shorter word provided by Franz’s father-in-law in the film: “Better to suffer injustice than to do it.”
“He came alive under that murky ambiguous sign; not a double cross, so to speak, but a bent cross, disabled, tampered with, horribly altered, crooked, nightmarish. A swastika.
Dare we admit it; this is the cross (which despite all frantic denials) - we too are born under ? Or the one we create for ourselves ?
The one we bend around, to our own crooked uses and whims and frenzies.
What we make of the cross !
I would not venture that Franz saw this from the first (who does) ?
Only that he saw it eventually. That cross hideously altered in form; a cross that favors deception, warmaking, unaccountability.
He saw . And he told what he saw. And then he died resisting what he saw.”
(From Daniel Berrigan’s Meditations on a Martyr )
Seth Wispelwey is a grassroots organizer, educator, non-profit consultant, and ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He loves movies, cooking, novels, and making cocktails for friends. Seth and his family recently moved from Charlottesville, VA to Tucson, AZ.