Over the years, Hollywood has managed to condition the viewer with particular movie-going expectations. We expect to be entertained. We expect a good story. And we expect that story to have resolution. In the Oscar-nominated film Doubt, writer/director John Patrick Shanley goes against this notion of a nicely wrapped Hollywood story when he chooses to leave the film's central question unanswered.
Doubt centers itself around the tenuous working relationship between a free spirited Catholic priest, Father Flynn (Philips Seymour Hoffman), and the parish's austere Principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep). When Father Flynn begins to give both special recognition and time to the school's first black student, Sister Beauvier begins to suspect inappropriate sexual behavior between the two. Sister Beauvier successfully rallies suspicion and the audience is left with... did anything happen?
If you expect to find such an answer within the film (or outside the film), you will be left empty handed. In an interview with Terry Gross, host of NPR's Fresh Air, Philip Seymour Hoffman addressed the accusations from the actor's perspective. When asked whether or not he had to know whether or not he abused the boy as he played Father Flynn, Hoffman asserted his knowledge as vital to the film's integrity. But other than Shanley himself, no one (including the cast) will ever be privy to such information for it would "destroy the experience of the moviegoer." And being fixated on experiential wonder here at rednoW, we applaud this move.
But the qualms surrounding "what happened" are a mere sub-plot to the tension at play between doubt, certainty, and the unknown. With a Christian faith as its backdrop, basic epistemological questions begin to emerge: Can certainty be achieved? What must we prove exactly? And how does one really know?
John Patrick Shanley addresses doubt's inevitable place midst these epistemological pursuits - but rather than warn of such thought, he affirms humanity's uncertain travels. In the film's opening homily, Father Flynn states:
Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty."
The question is thrown back to us... is it? Can doubt drive our quests of a mysterious faith? I cannot speak for everyone, but I have yet to meet an individual who lacked uncertainty. But is this not the cornerstone of curiosity? The birthplace of imagination? What drives the notion of knowledge at all?
At some point, we must recognize that full certainty places humanity in God-like realms. And I do not know about you, but I am certain that I am not God. At the same time, I think we could learn from the historical divergences midst this conversation - the tendency to place ourselves into an either/or scenario: either you know God with certainty or you can't know God at all.
But do both of these not negate the ability to really know God "some"? Would we have the priviledge of doubting at all if God was not even a little bit knowable?
I don't doubt it. Or maybe I do. You?
