JESUS CAMP (Rated M) documentary

 

A couple of months ago, we followed the furore around the American release of Jesus Camp, a documentary following Evangelical Pastor Becky Fischer, and her movement to build "God's Army of America" out of young children. Sadly, there's still no cinema distribution secured for an Australian release, and at this stage, it looks like we'll be waiting for Madman Inc (who have secured DVD rights) to release the film in video stores, next April. Thank God for the wonderful world of Bittorrent, where a high-quality DVD rip has now surfaced. As anyone who remembers will know, I was personally biting at the chomps to see this doco, and had to sit patiently, while it racked up award after award - left to read the mountain of sterling reviews and the press attention it received, while my anticipation reached boiling point.

 

I have now seen Jesus Camp, and like Estevez' Bobby, everyone else should see it, too. However, unlike Bobby, it's one of the most compelling two hours I've spent in front of the screen in God almighty knows how long (okay, okay, I'll cut the religious puns, now - but c'mon, it deserved a couple).  

 

For those who know anything about Jesus Camp, and particularly for those who have watched the preview, it's fair to say you'll get pretty much what you expect, from one angle. The children rolling on floors, crying, repenting to their saviour; the worshipping of George Bush; the speeches against abortion, homosexuality and Harry Potter; the alarming declarations of martyrdom elicited from kids as young as nine. It's all there, and you can pretty much guess the rest, as far as the political and "moral" ideas expressed go. But for some reason, I suspected the film would transcend the strange car-accident nature of watching these horrendous scenes of such abominable views, and offer us something more. That, it does.

 

Firstly, to step inside this world in the way spending two hours in an intimate documentary allows, is an experience that many of us have never really been able to do. Sure, we know the drill, and yes, we've seen it on the news, we've read their vile op ed pieces in the papers, and we've all found ourselves staring into 3am Evangelism on late night TV. But this is different. However saturated we may currently be with this topic, instead of feeling like the final overdose, Jesus Camp, perhaps surprisingly, feels more like a release from the level we generally meet this phenomenon at through our papers and TV screens. We talk so often about their existence, we shudder with the thought of some of those views and ways of life - but we tend to forget they are more than just figures we battle ideologically through media and popular culture. We are so use to discussing how frightening their views are; but are we so used to it that we no longer stop to actually feel frightened?  If so, then you're about to get the slap perhaps you need, because Jesus Camp, with it's intimate world of the opponent we have never truly walked in the shoes of, amounts to something so frightening (on an emotional, pseudo-real level) that the tired review cliche of "a film that stays with you long after the credits have rolled" is an understatement. And this isn't the kind of lingering we find in chilling tales of escapism or bleak (but trendy) social portraits. David Lynch films linger because they haunt your imagination; Jesus Camp jilts your perceptions, so that your comprehension of reality somehow feels more real. The cultural revolution of the last five years in America is no longer some topical discussion that "affects us all", but that is, at the end of the day, still about something happening "over there", somewhere, in a far off place. I wanted to feel angry, but to be honest, it left me too truly sadenned and disturbed to be something with such gust and drive. Michael Moore recently awarded the film "Scariest Movie of the Year". He's right. 

 

Even the scenes we have seen in the trailer change in nature, once we find them in the context of the actual film. To see the glimpses of young children crying on the floor, their hands shaking in the air, is a horrible thing; but to experience them in the intimate space of the film itself is really mortifying, because they are such deeper portrayals, enriched by the scope and depth that is experienced by immersing oneself in a two hour film. Unlike the trailer and news reports, the children are fleshed out as rounded characters, and so we feel their abuse so much more, because they become not representatives of the Christian Revival debate, but individuals. In one scene, Fischer installs the vital element to Christianity - the exploitation of vulnerability (and it's connection to guilt) through the all-seeing God who watches our most sordid, private moments - by taunting them, with the tone of the wicked stepmother in a fairytale, that God has seen their faults and is about to let her in on His little secret. Effectively, these children are emotionally blackmailed into public confession - a horrifying emotional apex of shame, unworthiness and humiliation - and to follow these bright, beautiful young kids as they are broken down and manipulated, occasionally borders on the unbearable. You want to jump through the screen and kidnap them, but of course, you can't. They've got 'em (they're kids, after all, they're not particularly difficult to capture); and you can do nothing but sit there, and grasp the reality of the glorious modern West. Thanks be to God.

 

The editing uses this, beautifully. There's no denying that Jesus Camp, as it has been heralded, is a return to a more objective ideal within documentary film-making, and the female directorial duo smartly leave themselves out of it (in striking contrast to the arguably egocentric style of the Moore films).  You really can't argue that Jesus Camp is a propaganda piece; and since the right have learnt that this is the disclaimer du jour for debunking progressive documentary-making, this is a clever (and much needed) move, and partly why the film caused such a stom. The real testimony to not only the objectivity of the film, but symbiotically the power of subjectivity as projected upon a "real" canvas, was when Becky Fischer launched a PR campaign in support of the film (seeing it as a wonderful tool for recruitment), telling the media that the film adequately portrayed her work, on the same day that Michael Moore gave it an award at a left-wing film festival. You can't get more balanced than a film that is claimed by both teams as their own. In so many ways, this "is" objectivity (or as close as one can get) - not something that is an undisputable truth, but something that allows each to project their own subjectivity upon it. I think the film is terrifying; but there's an awful lot of Christians who think the film is beautiful.

 

But even so, there seems (as subtle as it is) a constant awareness that we are supposed to be watching something quite horrifying; and at the end of the day, there is still a voice that can never truly be erased, once editing comes into the picture (as it must with any). In Jesus Camp, this comes in the form of editing that works like a kind of horror or thriller movie. Quickly cut episodes of the behind the scenes lives of the camp operators and attendees lead us to climactic moments of energetic hatred and psychological abuse. During these points, the editing slows down, as if it traps us within the moment, forcing us to deal with what is certainly uncomfortable for most intelligent, compassionate human beings. We get the hit, and then we are given time to breathe - returning to the faster paced journeys behind the scenes - until the next hit. It's like watching A Nightmare On Elm St: the day scenes in the high school are almost a relief, because we know we will be able to roll along with minimal anxiety, until inevitably Freddy will return to the screen, and we will be forced to sit through something most unpleasant. 

 

Furthermore, as far as the various Evangelist ideologies are related to this, each climax brings with it a more severe belief - each is a little more vicious, each shows a little more hatred that is increasingly destructive to a whole range of people (basically anyone who isn't a born again Christian). In the first scenes, Fischer preaches using fluffy toys, and the editing seems to choose moments of the sermon that work as black comedy. The first scene of preaching climaxes with Fischer's wrath toward Harry Potter ("He is an enemy of God!" she tells the children), and to be honest, I found myself laughing. But I have a suspicion that was precisely the plan, because as the film progresses, the Harry Potter sermon seems comparitively harmless. In the end, I found myself monitoring a mental checklist of all the things I knew were coming (anti-abortion - check; anti-Democrats - check; Islaamophobia - check; homophobia - check), and still, each time we would arrive at the scene, I would find myself flinching every time the woman and her vile colleagues spoke. The whole movie, they constantly remind us how they are warriors of "Love" (if only the whole world could possess the love these people seem to be under the impression they are privvy to!), but I spent the whole film feeling literally assualted by their hatred. I have a feeling that the film-makers knew I would be, too. 

 

But that's not to say that the film is ultimately biased, or that what we are witnessing has been interfered with by a film-maker eliciting a pre-conception or political agenda. One of the few criticisims I found of the film was that the screentime never penetrates the personal psychology to be found in the subjects, resulting in a film that isn't quite as profound as it could be. But I completely disagree. These reviewers would very much like the standard monologues we often find in documentaries, where the underlying dynamics (where the "point", if you like) is spelled out for us through a direct observation into the inner-workings of what we are seeing on the surface level. What we forget is that these mostly come from over-direction, where the reality is interefered with by a director eliciting the "light bulb moment" (to borrow from the Oprah dictionary). They're mostly interviews, where dialogue is not only deliberately drawn out, but even sometimes put in the mouth of the naive subject. Jesus Camp doesn't have those moments in such form - but it's all the better for not having them.

 

Rather, we observe the phenomenon in the most raw - or "real" - form, and this is the impressive impartiality the film achieves. As it is, the Evangelists are not exactly shy people, and are more than eager to preach to the camera, at whim. That's the bizarre psychological connection between some Christians and the era of Reality TV. The psychology of religion often depends upon a constant "show", of sorts. God's eyes are always on you, you are always in the Big Brother house when it comes to Christianity, and you are always being judged. There is no private, and all our behaviour is quite openly determined by our instilled fear of God's judgement (it's how they maintain psychological power through an aggressive discplinary system). We know that these people have "dirty thoughts", we know there's another reality in most of them (the film features a timely segment featuring Ted Haggard, the Pastor recently arrested for buying drugs and sex off a male prostitute, and who is currently in gay raparitive - or "sexuality reassignment" - therapy), but it is most important for them to create the external reality that desperately puts forward their ideal of the perfect, "Holy" Christian. They do this quite loudly, and let's face it, the directors didn't exactly have to do much to get those beliefs out of them; you can hardly put words into Becky Fischer's mouth (I don't believe she absorbs much of what other people are saying, anyway). This "is" who these people are. The directors don't ever step in and actively elicit a "light bulb moment" from them, and that's what makes it so real.

 

What these dissatisfied reviewers sorely missed (and not by their own fault, exactly) was that these moments of revelation - those instances (so powerful in a documentary because they are real) where something clicks and we see inside the psychology and meaning of the moment - are well and truly there. In some ways, I think Jesus Camp is probably twice the movie it is for others, if you're someone with a certain level of perceptual ability. It's there - but you have to be able to see it. The film never spells it all out for us; we are simply observing what is happening. With the added journeys into their more private moments (as private as they can be under the judgement of God), we are left to make some of the sense, on our own. Luckily, these are two very smart film-makers, and they know exactly what dialogue - what moment - to leave in. Often they're quite subtle, but their purpose is undeniable. They exist outside of the more horrific moments I spoke of earlier, and combined (the moments of madness and the moments of reason), Jesus Camp moves us far beyond the superficiality of contemporary socio-political rhetoric on the issue of Christian Revival. 

 

We spend so much time lost in our current obsession with the cultural "other" as conceptualised in the modern Villian™ that is Islaam. The finger of war points, and we judge, and we fear, and we condemn the extreme end of religion. But it's all some other religion, and it all happens in some far off world that we don't really know so awfully much about, anyway (not as much we think we do). Jesus Camp takes that finger, and firmly turns our hand, til it is pointing at ourselves. We find a glass house. I strongly suggest seeing Jesus Camp, before the next time you throw a fashionable stone.