thentically with them. To make art not for money, but in an attempt to change people. “Was there something that you can’t communicate through the music that you were hoping this movie would accomplish?” I asked them. Andy was quick to reply. “I think what I was hoping the movie would do, is get one person to have the same feeling I get, not very often, when I step back and think, ‘This is crazy. One day I’m going to die ….’ The reality is that one day you alone will face death. Nobody will be beside you walking you though it.” The band, who started out with the “Christian” label, seemed to have transcended their former genre, as their newer lyrics hint towards the more existential questions and experiences of a typical 20-something. However, the film finds a way to poke at those notions of faith and questioning from a more authentic, nuanced direction. Questions of faith seemed to still be an integral part of what they were trying to communicate: we are all seeking, and we’re all on a journey, together. Both artist and audience. After discussing how difficult it is to do this with music, I asked them about an even more difficult mission: trying to communicate a spiritual message to very non-spiritual people in Norway. Andy explained, “People that are our age [in Norway], you just don’t come across anybody that’s Christian. There’s this funny story about a line in the movie that goes, ‘A spirit is in the room with you.’ And Dagny (the female lead in the film), who’s of the younger generation, said, ‘I don’t know what this is, is it like a
for me, God is with her, and then in her death, there’s silence again, and it’s God with her. That theme isn’t explicit in the film, but it’s there for me. But for me to say this is what you need to think is too much of an agenda.” It was an interesting idea, the question of whether God is always present in silence or not. And I remembered the verse, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am also.” I wondered aloud if they admitted they didn’t know where their creative ideas came from, and what exactly gave them the courage to pursue them so zealously. I pondered whether there may have been “a spirit in the room” more often than they knew. “I wonder,” Josh said later, “if you have the belief that God has plans for people, I wonder if this is one of those things like, ‘Why did we go to Norway? Why were these people in the movie? Why these themes? Why was this story told?’ Maybe someone in Norway will watch this, and maybe it will put an idea in their head that’s bigger than what we could put there, that us just telling our story will help them think something different.”
A
few weeks later, I was out with another musician friend who is trying to make it. He talked excitedly about competing for The Peak prize next year, and the frustrations of explaining to his parents that he wanted to be a musician. After my experiences with the creatives on Commercial, I felt like I actually had some advice to give, besides, “Don’t expect to make any money!” “Find friends to do it with, and stick with them,” I told him. Because, as C.S. Lewis noted in The Four Loves, “in a perfect friendship … each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest … each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others.” If your greatest desire in the world is to make an impact, to finish something grand, to fulfill that creative drive that is overflowing from your soul, I offer the same charge: find others like you, who can become like family — who can lift you up when you’re down, keep you grounded, and spur you on to finish the race you’ve started. And if your parents or friends say it’s unrealistic, remind them about the vision that God presented us with in Scripture, of the New Jerusalem: a city, as Chesterton noted, “in which each of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour.” Remember this is what we are called to build towards, to create towards. And when we do create boldly in freedom, together with each other and with the Spirit, maybe we are the city.
You get to that place where you’re
Working so well together, And you can take Way bigger chances genie?’ And we were like, ‘No, a Spirit.’ Dagny replied, ‘I have no frame of reference for this other than Aladdin.’” In our culture, where many young people are cynical towards religion, it can be tough to discuss religious topics in one’s art — though at least it’s still in people’s frame of reference. In a very secular society like Norway, it’s hard to communicate when you don’t speak the language, literally and spiritually. “When I look at the old version [of the film], I was trying to push it in the faith or religious direction,” Andy continued. “Now it’s still there, but it’s more balanced. Like, in each chapter there’s a moment of silence. The first is when she baptizes herself.” A scene where Dagny, accompanied by her younger sister, hikes to a remote lake to dunk herself in the hopes of hearing God’s voice in the experience. “Then [these moments of silence] happen again. And I think for me, it’s like, ‘Is that silence God? Or is [there] no god?’ For me that silence is God. So when it returns in the film,
WTF?!
Sam McLoughlin is a freelance writer and author of The Default Life. Visit Sam’s personal website, sammcloughlin.com for more of his writing.
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