Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

His hand managed the packing so that it never touched the Bible that had sat like a rock in the bottom of the bag in the last few years. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood One of the most striking film sequences in recent American cinema, from The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997), effectively encapsulates the focus of this chapter. The sequence brings to life a confrontation between Sonny Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher, at the head of his small congregation, and the local racist redneck who, furious at the sight of whites and blacks praying side by side, interrupts the Sunday church picnic by arriving with his huge bulldozer ready to tear down the church building. To stop him, and rather than call the police, the preacher places his Bible on the ground, in the path of the mechanical dragon, and dares his opponent to drive over the holy book. When members of the congregation start placing their own Bibles on the ground in a circle around the bulldozer, the troublemaker's henchmen, ordered to remove the Book, do not dare touch it. At last, having climbed down from the vehicle to do so himself, and confronted by Sonny Dewey's quiet faith and firm determination, the troublemaker crumbles and is converted. A great deal has been written about films based on the Bible. Some studies examine films set in the modern world that in some allegorical, typological, or merely allusive way reference the ... log in or subscribe to read full text