303 - Films: Experiencing Tommy

Films: Experiencing Tommy
By David Pomeroy

THE film version of Tommy-The Who's rock opera-is a visceral experience. It communicates at a level of Jungian archetypes-eliciting reactions to death, disloyalty, false messiahs, materialism; and, on the positive side, seeing, hearing, touching, healing one another. Quite simply, it is the most important religious film of this year.

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I make that last statement fully aware that much in Tommy is antithetical to religious forms and institutions. But director Ken Russell has made the same wise decision Norman Jewison made earlier with Jesus Christ Superstar, to treat Tommy as opera, a larger-than-life medium in which music conveys an emotive power instead of a reasoned response. To the music, Russell has added a continuous flow of bizarre images-from women running through a war zone in slips, bras, and gas masks, to a 10-foot-high pinball wizard, to a white-on-white room filled with the excreta of TV commercials. Such images work on our viscera by calling into question the ultimate validity of neat, orderly (religious?) principles by which we believe the world and our lives can be governed.

Visceral, emotive experiences are important in shaping our religious sensibilities in what is still basically a linear, cognitive world, for they reach into that substance deep within which ultimately is given shape by reason. And films are potentially a significant medium in that process. Robert Altman (director of another important movie this year, Nashville) has said that we have not yet had a great movie because the medium has been too wedded to literary and linear forms; the "grammar" of films needs really to be a visceral one.

Certainly the plot of Tommy in outline form approaches the ludicrous. A young boy, seeing his mother and her lover kill his presumed dead war-hero father, becomes deaf, dumb, and blind. After fruitless attempts at cures, he discovers power as a "pinball wizard," achieves a following as a new messiah, regains his senses, and then is rejected as

David Pomeroy, who has reviewed films for THEOLOGY TODAY on several occasions, is Director of Broadcast Production of the Communication Commission of the National Council of Churches. Tommy is a Columbia Pictures and Robert Stigwood Presentation, produced by Robert Stigwood and Ken Russell. The Director is Ken Russell, who also wrote the screenplay, based on the rock opera, Tommy, by Pete Townshend. The film stars Ann-Margret as The Mother, Oliver Reed as The Lover, Roger Daltrey as Tommy, and features Elton John as The Pinball Wizard. Guest artists include Eric Clapton, John Entwistle, Keith Moon, Paul Nicholas, Jack Nicholson, Robert Powell, Pete Townshend, Tina Turner, and The Who. The soundtrack of the movie is available on Polydor Records and Tapes.

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his followers become disillusioned with pinball playing as the road to salvation.

But the plot is only a hatrack for the images and music. The underlying theme of Tommy is really death-death of illusions, death of personal sensitivities, and then real, physical death and its entrapment of us. Tommy's traumatic reaction to his father's death forces him to become interior, but his interior visions (a creative Russell visual addition) simply wed him more forcefully to the debilitating image of the dead father. Russell has made the archetypal imagery stronger here by reversing a key element of the original plot, where the father and mother kill the lover.

At the interpersonal level there is a continuous slow, small death of relationships throughout the course of the film. In the beginning there is a real, communicative love between husband and wife before Colonel Walker goes off to war and then again between mother and young son. But with the advent of the lover and then the traumatic event, communication declines. In an important early scene, Tommy plays with other children at a Christmas party, and his mother offers what could be understood as an example of conventional piety: "Tommy doesn't know what day it is/ He doesn't know who Jesus was or what praying is/ How can be saved/ From the eternal grave?"-and then desperately cries out, "Tommy, can you hear me?" Tommy's inner voice responds: "See me, feel me, touch me, heat me." The irony of this miscommunication in the midst of a celebration of the incarnational event is potent and despair-producing. Tommy's inner voice reaches out twice more, but the second time his mother is flirting with a doctor who has tried to heal him, and so she is oblivious to his interior cry. The third time he tries to reach her via TV after he has become famous; here, she actively rejects the attempt by trying to switch frantically to TV commercials until she is engulfed by those commercials and joyfully wallows in them. As an image of the numbing effect of mass communications on interpersonal relationships, this is a particularly powerful scene.

So Tommy is forced increasingly inward. His mother and lover become more shallow and insensitive, casually leaving him with a sadistic Cousin Kevin and a sex perverted Uncle Ernie, until Tommy through his mirror-image splits apart. His Dopplegänger, imbued with the senses (insight? love?) that Tommy lacks, leads him to a huge junkyard-filled with the effluence of civilization-where he discovers that perfect symbol of contemporary inanity and irrelevancy: the pinball machine.

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To this point the images are hope-less and sardonic. They include the explicitly religious symbols, such as Tommy as a Christ-image with stigmata while under the influence of the Acid Queen, and a travesty on a Catholic mass where devotees of Marilyn Monroe who have come for faith-healing are offered pills and scotch as the ele-

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ments. There is no relatedness and no sense of the freedom to which the gospel calls us.

Yet, in a desperate attempt to overcome her own shallowness, Tommy's mother tries once again to communicate with him, and Tommy thus breaks through the mirror of self into an ocean baptism offering the gift of new life (this in contrast to his mother's somewhat sarcastic observation just prior to this that her son had been "born again, to a life of wealth and fame"). "I'm free," he proclaims, "and freedom tastes of reality." For a few exuberant moments, we feel that he has broken through inhibiting human barriers to a genuine freedom; and yet the very next line of the song warns against too easy an acceptance of this freedom: "I'm free, and I'm waiting for you to follow me." His freedom is replaced by a messianic compulsion, and again the symbols are explicit: baptizing his mother, calling fishermen to follow him, a cross made up with a pinball on top. Tommy is not so much a Christ-figure, though, as a Parsifal-innocent, whose false gospel ("Come to my house, be one of the comfortable people") leads to material success even while it is based on a totally naive sense of the interaction between justice, service, and love.

The result of this is pointed up in the seemingly sidebar story of Sally-a teeny-bopper who is injured physically and destroyed spiritually by simply trying to reach Tommy, who is oblivious to her presence. He who had sought to be seen, touched, healed cannot now reach out to someone else because he is caught up in the glory of being a messiah. In comparing this scene with the story of Jesus turning back to a sick woman who bad reached out to touch his cloak (Mark 5:24-34), we find an effective contrast between a freedom/salvation based on self-indulgence or self-importance and that based on service and true assessment of others' needs. Martin Luther's dictum retains the paradox necessary to an understanding of freedom/salvation: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all."

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Tommy is a critical commentary on the inadequacy of religious forms and the materialism of religious institutions. It is at this level an example of "negative witness." Its surrealistic audacity and driving rock tempo effectively call into emotional tension much of what is false about contemporary institutional religion.

But if this were the most to be said about Tommy, it could hardly be called an important religious film. Running as a thread throughout the satire and cynicism is a soupcon of hope, as symbolized by a nearly omnipresent circle or ball, historically a symbol of eternity or perfection. Even the film itself describes a circle, as the initial hopeful image of Tommy's father looking into a rising sun returns at the end after Tommy's frantic flight from the now-vengeful followers. Here the closed circle between father and son is a moment of celebration, whereas earlier the son's internal identification with his father

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bordered on the pathological (for example, the intermixing of father/ son egos in the Acid Queen sequence). Despite the violence from his followers (who assert that "your freedom doesn't reach us"), Tommy has not quite lost his innocence, and he is prepared to follow another interior image into that rising sun. The hopeful side of Tommy is in the retention of innocence in the midst of violent (death-dealing) rejection of a false messianism, for it is consonant with Jesus' teaching to be "wise as serpents and innocent as doves" (Matt. 10:16). Paradoxically, that spherical image of eternity is there as well both when Tommy receives his greatest insight (in the junk yard with his alter ego) and at the time of his least sensitivity and self-absorption (the pinball). The admixture of innocence and worldliness is one of the most important paradoxical insights of the gospels (being "in, but not of, the world"), and it is to Ken Russell's and Peter Townshend's credit that they have not compromised with the depths of that paradox. In the end, Tommy is a legitimately hopeful movie.

The above is cognitive and linear-as it must be in this context-but it needs to be emphasized that the primary value of Tommy lies in its musically emotive power rather than in its reasoned philosophy. We feel the clash between innocence and worldliness, between hope and despair, between sensitive healing/listening and death-even as we feel them at work deep within our own visceras, if we but take the time to so feel. To experience Tommy is to open up the possibility of such deep feeling taking place.