God in the Age of Twitter
by Wendy Zierler
In the 1998 film The Truman Show, Truman Burbank -- whose very name yokes the human aspiration for truth with the fictions or mistruths of Hollywood (Burbank, California) -- takes a ship to the edge of his film set, Seahaven. Then he climbs a set of stairs (as if to heaven) and exits this world through a dark door leading to who knows where. Truman's journey of discovery reveals the sham nature of his media-generated reality and its would-be god, Christof. Notably, Christof demonstrates much of what Judeo-Christian tradition has long taught about God: he is a Creator; with his ubiquitous, providential camera-eyes, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. In accordance with the cosmology of Genesis, he cues the sun and brings forth the rain; like God in the book of Jonah, he summons a storm on the sea to force his way upon his recalcitrant messenger. At times he is a punitive ruler; at others, he is paternal, stroking the image of Truman on the screen, as a father would a son. The final bow that Truman takes at the end of the film stands not for obeisance but for rebellion against the norms and assumptions that Christof has conditioned him to uphold.
A modernist, Freudian reading of Truman's exit at the film's end might suggest that Truman has been cured of his religious neurosis and is now ready to live a healthy life, free of the pseudo-God. An existentialist reading suggests that he has learned to reject the media-staged meanings previously made for him and is now ready to make meaning of his own.
But is there really any way to find ultimate meaning outside of words, signs, symbols, and images -- that is, outside the realm of human-language media? As a film that is all about the need to distrust the film medium, The Truman Show indicates, in frank terms, the extent to which we cannot, and perhaps ought not, attempt to flee the superstructure of words, images, narration, and representation that governs our sense of selfhood and freedom.
A post-secular, religious reading of the film -- like that which I attempt to do with my rabbinical students in a course entitled "Reel Theology" -- entails both a rejection of Christof-like idols and an affirmation of what God really is. Arthur Green's ecological rethinking of God and tradition refers to God as Being, as the life force that dwells within the universe. From my text-centered, covenant-centered Jewish vantage point, I maintain a belief that central to the uncovering of God in our lives is a recognition of the sacredness of words, and our godly indwelling within language, for it is our ability to communicate, create, and relate in words and signs, both to each other and to God, that identifies us as created betzelem elohim (in the image of God). It is for this reason that the Torah imagines the creation of the world through a speech act. As Truman's incipient relation with an extra named Sylvia suggests, truth and God inhere in real, freely chosen relationships, in love as expressed in language.
In 2010, we are no longer as surprised by the idea of reality TV. What was mere fiction in 1998 is very much our reality. For that reason, more than ever, we need to have a sense of where religion and God intersect with our media-saturated existence. Where is our godly text in our world of texting, tweeting, YouTubing, and downloading? What structures in our lives allow us to identify the godliness or eternal significance of language, learning, human conversation, and relationship? And how can we fill our time not with noisy verbiage, but with the language of transcendence?
Wendy Zierler, a professor at HUC-JIR, New York, is the author of And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women's Writing (2004) and is currently writing a book on film and Jewish theology, based on a course co-taught with theologian Eugene Borowitz.
Zierler, Wendy. 2010. God in the Age of Twitter. Tikkun 25(2):57 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010zierler
