Review

Books

Comedy

Culture

Trauma

23 October 2024

5 min read

Miranda Hart's diagnosis of the unseen

Beyond a medical illness she's on to something supernatural.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

On a TV chat show, guests look to one of their own talking to the audience.

Mirnada regales a chat show.

There I was, standing in the book aisle with a choice before me. One that would dictate my mental state for the week ahead: I could pick up Boris Johnson’s hotly anticipated autobiography (although, at £30, it would mean putting the bottle of wine in my basket back on the shelf) or I could choose Miranda Hart’s latest literary offering.

Externally, all seemed calm. Internally, an almighty battle of the books was raging within me. The price of Boris’ ruled out the option of buying both. So, which should I pick? Whose voice should I invite to live inside my brain for the next five days? Both books were offering me a cultural bandwagon to hop on, I just had to decide which wagon looked like the better option.

Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda… Boris… Miranda…

After some intense deliberation, I popped BoJo’s memoir back on the shelf and became the proud owner of Miranda Hart’s new book. And I must admit, after hearing from friends who chose Boris to be the victor of their own battle of the books, I am very happy with my decision.

Miranda Hart, the deeply beloved comic actor, sit-com writer, and stand-up comedian, hasn’t been entirely honest with us. For decades, she has been suffering with what she now knows to be Lyme Disease. In her book, she draws back the curtain and reveals a lifetime worth of suffering with illness after illness – bronchitis, tonsillitis, pericarditis, gastroenteritis, labyrinthitis – as Miranda succinctly puts it, ‘too many itises’. Despite illness being her body’s default state, Miranda kept calm(ish) and kept on. That is, until around a decade ago when her symptoms became simply unbearable.

She tells the story of collapsing onto her living room floor, extreme fatigue rendering her utterly unable to pick herself up. This was the beginning of months of being bedbound and years of having to press pause on her life. Miranda recalls how she wept with relief at being able to crawl to the bathroom, of how she had to watch the television with sunglasses on because of neurological symptoms, and how she would ‘look at a cup of tea on the table and wonder if I had the strength to take a sip’. She also paints a terrifying picture of not being believed - of living with an illness that nobody can understand, of suffering with symptoms that have no explanation. Miranda contracted Lyme Disease when she was fourteen, and had it diagnosed when she was in her forties.

It seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing.

For those with no experience of living with a chronic illness, Miranda’s honesty will open your eyes to the pain and frustration that comes with your body not allowing you to live the life you crave. If you do have experience of chronic illness, this book will make you feel seen.

But, alas, this is Miranda Hart we’re talking about. If you’re looking for a woe-is-me book, this isn’t it (maybe you’d have more luck trying Boris?). This book is brimming with:

A) End-of-chapter dance breaks

B) Jokes about wind (obviously)

C) Theology

I kid you not.

Each of her chapters outline a ‘treasure’ that she has found in the depth of her suffering, the ‘watchwords’ that she uses to encapsulate these treasures are: love, faithfulness, peace, self-control, kindness, goodness, joy, gentleness and patience.

I got to chapter four of the book and had myself a real – ‘hang on a minute…’ - moment. As a Christian, I’ve grown up with another way of grouping those words together: I call them ‘the fruits of the Spirit’.

By chapter five I was convinced: Miranda Hart has released a spiritual book.

She has, quite excellently, trojan-horsed a bunch of Bible into the Sunday Times best-seller’s chart. And nobody seems to have noticed, I almost feel a little guilty for outing her. All the book reviews I’ve read note the hard-won warmth and wisdom included in this book (both of which are there, by the way) and conclude that it is a truly lovely self-help manual. And that’s where they’re wrong.

This is precisely not self-help.

In fact, I get the subtle sense that the self-help industry is one that irks Miranda a little bit, and understandably so – the idea that we can ice-bath ourselves into wellness must sound odd to someone who can’t pick themselves up off their living room floor. So, I’ll say it again: self-help is not what this book is.

Instead, it seems that Miranda Hart is trusting that all that she can see is not all that there is – that her suffering is not the truest thing about her and that she doesn’t need to be the source of all of her healing. She mentions, again and again, that the truest thing about her (and us, her 'Dear Reader Chums') is that she, and we, are loved. Deeply, unconditionally, unshakably loved. We haven’t earnt it and therefore can’t lose it. In her darkest moments, she had lost everything – her career, her social life, her home, her hopes and dreams - but she never lost that love. Everything else she has to say in the book flows from that belief.

I happen to think she’s dead right – but that is, undeniably, a faith statement. This book is built upon them.

And listen, you could read this lovely book – giggle and weep your way through it – without ever sensing anything supernatural within it. But, make no mistake, there is the supernatural within it.

What Miranda has affectionately called her ‘treasures’ and the Bible calls ‘the fruits of the Spirit’ are just that; they’re what grow when one lives a life informed by and infused with God’s spirit. They’re the tangible symptoms of putting yourself in God’s presence, of keeping company with him. They are him rubbing off on us.

What I’m trying to get at is this: these ‘fruits’, they’re seen in us, but they’re all God. They’re not the fruits of the self and so the way to obtain them cannot be self-help.

Miranda obviously appreciates that belief in any divine/supernatural/transcendent thing can be complex, that the notion of ‘god’ can come with baggage, and religion can be an all-out no-no. And so, she is incredibly subtle with what she has to say. This book is not self-help, but it’s not evangelism either. She uses her beloved ‘ists’ (phycologists, neurologists, sociologists etc.) to unpack the ‘treasures’/’fruits’, showing how recent research and ancient religion have many of the same things to say.

I really am unspeakably glad I didn’t pick Boris.

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.