In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • White Nights of the Soul:Christopher Nolan's Insomnia and the Renewal of Moral Reflection in Film
  • J. L. A. Garcia (bio)

In this Light, how can you hide?
You are not transparent enough
while brightness breathes from every side.
Look into yourself: here is your Friend,
a single spark, yet Luminosity itself.

Pope John Paul II, "Shores of Silence"1

I said . . . to Eve[ning], "Be soon."

Francis Thompson, "Hound of Heaven"2

Insomnia is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish—that is, that there is no longer any way of withdrawing from the vigilance to which one is held. . . . The present is welded to the past, is entirely the heritage of the past: it renews nothing. It is always the same present or the same past that endures . . .

. . . this immortality from which one cannot escape . . . a vigilance without recourse to sleep. That is to say, a vigilance without refuge in unconsciousness, without the possibility of withdrawing into sleep as into a private domain.

Emmanuel Levinas, Time And The Other3 [End Page 82]

I. Introduction

Today, of course, most of what is called popular culture is part of our civilizational problem, not its solution. Still, renewing the civilization requires reaching people where they are, and today most of us spend much of our time, especially our most prized leisure time, splashing about in television series, magazines, lowbrow Web sites, and motion pictures featuring Hollywood stars. Professor Fox-Genovese reminds us that Jacques Maritain in his Art and Scholasticism advanced two damning statements of proportion: literature is to art as vanity is to moral life and poetry is to art as grace is to moral life.4 If that's correct, then surely motion pictures must rank beneath literary fiction. Perhaps it is perverse then to scrutinize, in search of moral insight, an American-made feature film with familiar American movie stars (though a British director). Nonetheless, that is what I do here. I will not claim Christopher Nolan's work in his movie Insomnia constitutes artistry.5 Susan Sontag famously wrestled with the question whether even photography amounted to an art form, surely leaving cinema even more in doubt. Even if there have been artists, even geniuses, of this most influential and impressive of media, Nolan has not produced a body of work that warrants his inclusion in that pantheon. Still, Nolan displays fine film craftsmanship in this work, and it revolves around central moral questions. His movie, if I am correct, depicts and perhaps affords glimpses of the operation of that grace of which Maritain spoke.

My title makes reference to St. John of the Cross's poem "Dark Night [of the Soul]," which, in his commentary, the mystic describes as a night of "purgative contemplation" following a voluntary discipline of self-denial.6 His travel and travail through this passage, "horrible and awful to the spirit," is guided by an inner luminosity. "This light," the saint writes, "grounded me More surely than the light of noonday / To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me / A place where no one appeared."7 In our reflections, we do well to remember that such illumination must first penetrate [End Page 83] the soul from without before it can serve as a lamp within. My title also invokes Dostoevsky's 1848 story White Nights, set in St. Petersburg and subtitled "A Tale of Love from the Reminiscences of a Dreamer." For Dostoevsky's lonely dreamer, the nights are bright with wonders and promise. Its narrator rhapsodizes,

It was a marvelous night. The sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky. This too is a question that would occur only to the young, the very young; but may God make you wonder like that as often as possible. Now, mentioning whimsical, angry people makes me think how well I behaved that day.

Recall, also, the story's last section, "The Morning," which begins "My nights were over. It was the morning...

pdf

Share