Lorenzo's Chrism

One of the great fears of the modern imagination is that it will lose its freedom if it inserts itself with decision into the limited actual world. Allow me to take a minor risk. I would propose that the great debate we must work out is whether the imagination wins its freedom by seeking quick infinities through the rapid and clever manipulation of the finite—or does it win it by passing through all the rigors, densities, limitations, and decisions of the actual. . . . Between Hollywood and some of the secret desires of the more sophisticated symbol makers (in both culture and politics) there is a secret but real kinship.

—William Lynch, "Theology and the Imagination" (1954)

This essay is an early, necessarily exploratory, implicitly exhortatory contribution to putting lived culture—"the people"—back into U.S. cultural studies. What I am asking of my readers is not only to engage structures of received and made meaning that have been overlooked or misunderstood but to press beyond the evidentiary procedures and narrative protocols of contemporary academic interdisciplinarity in order to meet the objects of our inquiry—human beings moving in time and space—more than halfway. Since what I am particularly concerned about is the tendency in cultural studies to condescension via abstraction—"Watch out, Jack," Ralph Ellison once quipped, "there are people down here"—I have chosen to focus on the conjuncture between an undervalued structure of knowing and doing—lay Catholic devotion—and three commonplace social institutions that cultural studies holds accountable for national projects of dehumanization and delegitimization: the nuclear family, which through the sentimental popular imagination inscribes reproductive heterosexuality as requisite for civic identity; research medicine, wherein the body is colonized technologically for capitalism's ends and the body politic regulates itself by means of medicine's metaphoric regimes; and middle-class European descent, which in its racist embrace of a faux pluralism throws up a screen of "ethnicity" while claiming and exercising invidious forms of white privilege. The purpose of this essay is not to challenge the primacy, on a large scale, of these ideological dynamics, but rather to kick-start the reinstatement in our overall picture of middle America of the contesting work of cultural fragmentation, contrariness, and choice in lives that have been lived under such regimes. My case study here focuses on a single movie, a risky business. But Lorenzo's Oil (1992) is a very strong place to begin, not only because the film pursues Catholic devotionalism and extracatechetical meaning-making into areas where the academy has not gone, but also because the movie's hybridized generic form—a sentimentalized intellectual thriller with hagiographic afterglow—acts as a scene of instruction in what may be required of scholarly thick description if we are to press beyond secular protocols to "get at" and "open up" and "disseminate" spirituality's material subject.

In her controversial essay, "Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies" (1995), the late Jenny Franchot decried the profession's devaluing of religion as an object of study and category of analysis. She countered the anticipated presumption that religious, especially Christian, discourse was ipso facto "reactionary" by pointing to "an ecumenically complex and increasingly multicultural language not entirely reducible to its most contentious political or regional voices," yet her underlying logic was less anthropological or postmodern than it was Enlightenment Protestant and jeremiadic. Franchot argued that Foucauldian models of social determinism reduce "the interior life of the person" to "the colors and copulation habits of our bodies," but the radical division between mind and body, free will and social form, that she attributed to the poststructuralist "Counter-Enlightenment" is in this hierarchical dichotomy very much her own, as her shorthand reduction of black Atlantic and queer studies to a na�ve biological determinism makes painfully clear. (Susan Mizruchi, the editor of Religion and Cultural Studies, originally planned with Franchot, takes up these issues where Franchot's polemic leaves them; the scholars and writers gathered in...