JUST FYI POD: CULTURE
SEASON 1, EPISODE 17: “Our 20 Most Spiritually Significant Films of All Time: #6”
The main task of Just FYI Pod: Culture’s first season is to explore the “20 Most Spiritually Significant Films of All Time.” On this episode, Amy Welborn and I continue our discussion—this time focusing on the #6 film on our respective lists. Amy begins with Federico Fellini’s 1954 Italian drama The Road (La strada), while I follow with Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 biblical epic psychological drama Magnolia.
These are, first of all, two classic works from two celebrated auteurs. And yet, even more importantly, both films explore the stubbornness of sin (particularly masculine sin) along with the hope or, better yet, the need for divine redemption. As ever, relevant clips and links are provided below. Please like, rate, comment, and share!
It was perhaps a mistake to re-watch Jason Robards with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and that searing monologue on regret. My wife and I keep discussing this to no good end, but we've swept in Hallmark movies and their popularity into the same bin. There's just a desire for a final realization, a closing reconciliation, as a deathbed setting plays out -- and it never happens. It's so striking to me that art is filled with these episodes, and life has brought me so many conversations with people frustrated or even furious that they could not get there. My own recent bout with that setting, sitting in Parma's chair, was an extended spiral of intensifying rationalization and self-justification in the face of all facts. Plus my sister and I are going through this with our mother, whose grandiosity and narcissism is only swelling monstrously with increasing Alzheimer's symptoms.
So it's a great scene, and a powerful possibility: I'm just left feeling like my wife is correct, and that Earl & Frank & Parma are like a very dark but still sunlit Hallmark story where despite the obstacles and complication, there will come a moment of reflection and regret. Just like all the lonely big city career women will end up with the flannel-shirted axe throwing husbandman in an aesthetically pleasing rural idyll, and an old tractor that will finally start running smoothly just before the minute 118 kiss.