CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE MOVIES
Family: The Other Boleyn Girl (2007)
This is not to claim that this movie reaches the heights of literary masterworks, though it is based on a popular novel. Few would claim high artistic merits for The Other Boleyn Girl. Still, it’s worth a look, especially given that there are some accurate, historically relevant tie-ins to the role of two real sisters in the bizarre marital history of King Henry VIII, nearly a century before Shakespeare. The movie is based on a novel by Phillippa Gregory, a British author who specializes in historical fictions, primarily romances, but with feminist overtones. The Other Boleyn Girl anachronistically highlights the Boleyn women’s independence and empowerment, framed by some careful historic research.
The Other Boleyn Girl, the movie, is a “bodice ripper,” a good date movie. Expect to see a costume drama, spiced with sexy scenes (brief, but R-rated), overlaid with pseudo-Shakespearian dialogue declaimed in veddy, veddy British accents. The actors are romanticized and fantasized beyond belief, in Hollywood’s usual breathless form. Henry VIII is portrayed by Eric Bana (from Munich) as a handsome, slim, buff figure. The competing but loving Boleyn sisters, Anne and Mary, are played by two of Hollywood’s hottest young romantic stars, Natalie Portman (Anne) and Scarlett Johansson (Mary).
In the English Lit 101 version, Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, failed to produce a male heir, which was Henry’s motivation for wanting a new wife. Mary Boleyn was the first of the two sisters to step to the challenge. After a torrid affair, Mary Boleyn bore Henry a son. But this child was a bastard, hence could not inherit the throne.
Anne Boleyn was next. She was Henry VIII’s second wife. Like Mary, Anne also charmed Henry, but refused to bed him until he agreed to marry her and make her his queen. Not only did the Boleyn sisters enthusiastically pursue their ambitions to bed and wed Henry, their entire family supported them and worked towards making their dreams happen, to their final catastrophe. To them, the risks were outweighed by the hoped-for prize of becoming a part of the royal lineage.
Ultimately, Anne’s only issue was a girl, who eventually became Queen Elizabeth. For his immediate needs, that wasn’t good enough for Henry. Anne Boleyn followed Catherine of Aragon out the royal palace exit door as Henry continued his search for a woman, seemingly any woman, who could bear him a legitimate Tudor son. Henry had Anne beheaded, so Auntie Mary raised little Elizabeth. A loyal, supporting sister, Mary pleaded for Anne’s life to be spared, to no avail. In all, Henry racked up six marriages, and failed in his reproductive goal every time.
The religious intrigues surrounding Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn was the seedbed for the English Reformation, which exploded out of Pope Clement’s refusal to grant an annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine. Henry broke away from the Catholic Church in order to pursue his new marriage to Anne Boleyn. This led to establishing the Church of England with Henry as its head. The rest, as they say, is history.
Social and Ethical Implications: Sibling Dynamics. Ponder this assumption about the importance of bloodlines and royalty in the bigger picture of human society. Why do people formulate class distinctions based on kinship, from the nuclear family all the way to warfare within and between the nations of the world? It is not just an Anglophile obsession, but seemingly, a human condition of Freudian dimensions.
Freud’s theories, such as the Oedipus Complex, lend considerable insight into family interrelationships. Freud’s own case studies focused on the repressed Viennese women he treated; but in his psychological writings, he dealt mainly with the developmental arc of men’s lives. Towards the end of Freud’s career, he professed not to understand women at all, asking, “What do women want?” The Oedipus Complex itself bears little obvious relationship to the Boleyn sisters’ situation with Henry, since it describes masculinity issues, but it could shine some light on the pursuit of legacies based on bloodlines.
Modern psychology, building on Freud, has come up with several derivative ideas, such as birth order theory. Intuitively, it is easy to see that when a couple marries, they focus completely on one another. When their first baby is born, the parents have to adjust their family’s orbit to bring their new child into the center of their universe. But when a second child is born, their first child loses that advantage of being the only child. In fact, as the children grow up, the parents usually assign a caretaking role to the older child, while the “baby” of the family is the one most likely to be “spoiled.” One result is that the older child develops jealousy of the younger in the competition for parental affection.
Childhood expectations, embedded by patterns of nurturance and relationships like these, rule one’s deepest adult attitudes about everything that matters. Oldest sons and daughters assume authority and responsibility, and become good managers. Often, Presidential candidates were oldest children. Biblical narratives, both Old Testament and New Testament world views, assume a similar common authoritative system at every social level from the nuclear family through monarchies and dictatorships.
How many Scriptural stories begin with words like, “A certain man had two sons”? Theology begins with the sovereignty of God as King and Lord of all. Faith in God begins with surrender of the will. In America, there is a tension between egalitarian democratic ideals and the model of an ecclesiastical hierarchy with a supreme head, whether it be a Pope or a Protestant denomination. In terms of global conflicts, it is healthy to remember that God is not an American, particularly not a partisan member of either political party. National sovereignty is a keystone of U. S. foreign policy, but not of theology. Looking beyond our own borders to the current Middle East turmoil, including Arab-Israeli conflicts and the ongoing Iraq War, these same paternalistic dynamics are manifestly evident.
Biblical family and other social models run into some resistance in our culture, particularly in terms of women’s challenges to the assumption that they are expected to be subordinate to men in the home and the church. Here in this movie, the Boleyn sisters’ ambitions to marry King Henry VIII and bear his son fit right in with our religious traditions. They were ambitious for the power that comes with royalty, but their avenue towards gaining power was to become royal wives and/or mistresses and mothers.
