Film Review: Northfork
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Published in the Online Journal of Religion and Film, Vol 8, No 1, ISSN 1092-1311, April 2004 link to webpage
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[1] Northfork, released in 2003 is a US independent film
from the Polish brothers, starring Nick Nolte, James Woods and Daryl Hannah.
Most agree that the film is beautiful: shot in rural Montana in early
spring, it has a bleak elegiac cinematography. Northfork is a town about
to be drowned, as the dam, which will provide its relocated citizens with
hydroelectric power, is about to be commissioned. Early in the film we
are introduced to the ‘Evacuators,’ men in black, driving 50’s style black
Fords, and who take with them a boxed set of a child's angel wings for
the families they are urging to higher ground. Where the magic realism
of Northfork is incomprehensible to some, and maudlin to others, the gentle
humour of it is always at the forefront, masking in fact a story of terrible
sadness. The metaphor of a town that is ‘dammed’ (damned), and its citizens
forced into exile, is the vehicle for a parallel story of a band of modern-day
surrealist angels. They have a mission: to find the last lost ‘angel’
– and are not sure if it is the person of 8-year old, Irwin (Duel Farnes).
The boy is being cared for by Father Harlan (Nick Nolte) and lives in
parallel worlds: as the sick child and also as the prospective angel. [2] At issue for the ‘angel’ boy is to prove his status,
and he does this first by bringing them st of the child angels of the
Plains? The band are not convinced by an examination of the angel wing
feathers, but cannot deny that the scars on the boy’s back tell of the
surgical removal of … wings. [3] The psychologist C.G.Jung was interested in creativity
and held that all genuine art originates in the unconscious. He also held
that colonising people inherit the racial memory of the natives they displace.
This is to raise a possibility about Northfork: that as a work of art
it follows both of Jung’s dictums, and is really about the destruction,
not of a 50s American town, but about the Native American way of life.
The clues are everywhere when we pursue this analysis: who else could
these ‘angels’ of the Plains be, other than the Native Americans? Who
were shot by tranquillisers and ‘grounded’ by the removal of their (cultural)
wings? What else is the extraordinary dog-on-stilts that leads the boy
to the angels but a shamanic totem animal? What is the accidental shooting
of the dog (by tranquilliser dart) but a reprise of the accidental emasculation
of a race? What else is the obsession with feathers but a shamanic fetish? [4] Here, we suggest, lies the real spiritual content of
the film, a juxtaposition of shamanic spiritual values with Christian
ones, and a meditation on the loss that haunts the American psyche. Towards
the end of the film the priest sits with the gravedigger and says: “I
am a man of faith. My job is to dispel doubt. But I doubt my faith.” No
explicit reason is given in the film about why he should doubt his faith;
indeed he acts on its deepest imperatives: caring for the sick. In the
way that he nurses the abandoned boy we see everything that St Paul stood
for: spiritual love in Christ translated into care for those in need in
the world. Yet it was a Christian culture that destroyed the native Nature-culture,
not malevolently, but as a by-product of the clash of incompatible ways
of using the land. What took thousands of years in Europe was completed
in a few generations in America. [5] The mainstream may dismiss the film as incomprehensible,
the highbrow critic as maudlin. But a spiritual analysis shows, if we
hold to Jung’s dictums, that it is a great work of art. The Polish brothers
have responded to a powerful anxiety in the American unconscious, perhaps
the most important spiritual conflict in its history: the loss suffered
by an innocent peoples. As Native American values are becoming positively
re-assessed, particularly in the light of pending environmental catastrophe,
their spiritual tradition is also increasingly regarded (witness the flourishing
of neo-Shamanic movements in the US). The priest’s reasons for doubt may
be buried in the collective unconscious, but art can bring it to the surface.
For Christianity to redeem itself we suggest that it must also undergo
this collective catharsis. |