Essay

Culture

Film & TV

9 April 2024

5 min read

Scorsese’s fusion

The director's whole canon is infused with religion.

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

A bloody and shocked boxed leans on the ropes

Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

United Artists.

Since the release of Silence in 2016, film critics have referred to Martin Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’; this term refers to the legendary director’s three faith-based movies, a 'trilogy' of films which was brought to a neat completion by Silence.

Or was it?

Scorsese recently announced his next project: The Life of Jesus. This will be his fourth film that sits comfortably within in the ‘faith’ category, shattering the neat theory of a trilogy of films. Not only that, this film, which will be an adaptation of a novel of the same name by author Shūsaku Endō (who also authored Silence), has officially put an end to a notion that has irked me for some time: that themes of religion and faith are exclusive to just three of Scorsese’s twenty-six films.

Into the seventh decade of his long career, it feels as though no cinematic ground has been left uncovered by Scorsese. From a children’s film about the awe-inspiring wonder and amazement that cinema offers (Hugo), to an absurdist black comedy with an unassuming philosophical sting (After Hours), to a psychodrama depicting the corrosive effects of isolation and disillusionment eerily predictive of today’s Incel culture (Taxi Driver). And then there are the films that, at least at first glance, stand in opposition to his signature mobster-epics - his aforementioned ’Trilogy of Faith’.

Even when Scorsese is telling stories completely removed from faith, he still weaves spiritual content into the fabric of his work.

Scorsese’s first foray into depicting overtly spiritual subject matter was 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It sees Scorsese, and frequent collaborator and screenwriter Paul Schrader, seek to find and dissect the humanity of Jesus (played by Willem Defoe). This film dives headfirst into the complex waters of the incarnation, asking what it means for Jesus to be both fully man and fully God. Scorsese subsequently creates a portrait of Jesus as a human wrestling with the complexity and ambiguity of his own divinity.

His second ‘Faith Movie’ sees him delve into the world of Buddhism and non-violence with 1997’s Kundun. It is part history lesson, part spiritual exploration, showcasing the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. The film begins with the Dalai Lama being discovered by monks at the age of two and tracks his life as both the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, until its annexation by China and his exile to Northern India in 1959. Similarly to Last Temptation, it is within the ambiguity of a dual identity that Scorsese finds the narrative thread of the film; while Scorsese’s Jesus is caught in the tension of being both God and man, the Dalai Lama must wrestle with his identity as both the political and spiritual leader of a nation amidst a world in constant conflict.

Which brings us to the supposed culmination of Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’: 2016’s Silence. The film, based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō, tells the story of two Catholic Portuguese missionaries in 17th Century Japan. When it comes to the setting and plot of this film, the crucial contextual detail is that, in an attempt to stamp-out peasant uprisings, Christianity has been outlawed in Japan. And yet, the film sees these two Catholic priests (played by Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) venture into a land where Christians are being routinely tortured and executed for their faith. Their motivation for doing so is to find their mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly renounced his faith. Upon their arrival, the two priests are confronted with the reality of the Japanese regime, coming face-to-face with relentless brutality and violence. And, as the narrative unfolds, they become active participants in the fate of other Christian prisoners, for whom the choice to defend or renounce their faith is a choice between life or death. As a result, we witness the priests’ personal beliefs, as well as their opinions of Father Ferreira’s decision, begin to change.

And there we have it: what the critics would have you believe is Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’. While it is true that these are the only films that directly depict religious subject matter, this theory overlooks the constant presence of religious imagery and themes throughout his entire career. Indeed, there is more to Scorsese’s highly stylised, Rolling Stones soundtracked, bombastic gangster films than this theory would have you believe.

To fully expound the religious themes in Scorsese’s work would require an entire career retrospective: from his very first film (Who’s That Knocking at my Door – 1967), where the young Catholic boy struggles to reconcile his idealisation of the virginal purity of women with the reality of the women in his life, all the way up to his latest feature, (Killers of the Flower Moon - 2023), the third act of which is built upon notions of guilt, confession and forgiveness. Even when Scorsese is telling stories completely removed from faith, he still weaves spiritual content into the fabric of his work.

Silence, 2016.

A 17th century monk holds up a wafer before an altar while Japanese Christians kneel.

Andrew Garfield in Silence.

Yet, there is one film, and one scene in particular, that I would suggest epitomises the profound influence that Christianity has had on Scorsese’s life and work; it is the closing scene of 1980’s Raging Bull, a biopic of Italian-American boxer, Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro). And you’d be forgiven for thinking that this stark film about a man who is defined by violence has no spiritual content, nor religious imagery to it. Yet, as the film draws to a close, La Motta looks at himself in a mirror and recites Marlon Brando’s famous ‘I coulda been a contender...’ monologue from On The Waterfront. And then, as the film fades to black and the only thing left for the audience to expect is the rolling of the credits, an excerpt of John’s Gospel fills the screen:

‘So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been born blind and said “speak the truth before God, we know this fellow is a sinner”. “Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know”, the man replied. “All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see”’.

This movie, which neither centres religion nor cinema in its plot, climaxes with one of the greatest cinematic monologues, and ultimately, a Bible verse.

Why?

Because, for Scorsese, a man who flirted with entering the priesthood in his younger years and was first exposed to cinema through one of his local priests, the marriage of Catholicism and cinema have defined his life. Therefore, when it comes to work of Martin Scorsese, it would be impossible to have one without the other.

Now that Scorsese himself has explicitly moved beyond the idea of a ‘Trilogy of Faith’; perhaps the critics, and we the audience, should do the same.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.