Last night was our annual Christmas viewing of The Bishop’s Wife, a wonderful 1947 movie starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young. It’s one of my favorite movies for any time of the year. Cary Grant plays an angel named Dudley, who appears in response to the prayers of David Niven’s Henry, a bishop who is trying to raise funds for a cathedral while worrying about the state of his marriage. Loretta Young plays his wife, Julia, whose unhappiness troubles Henry. Throughout the movie, Henry is torn between trying to appease his donors to build a glorious cathedral and trying to appease his wife, who misses their simpler life before he took on such responsibilities.
Cary Grant is a debonair, charming angel. It’s fun to watch him delight in his powers as an angel to be helpful–whether getting index cards to file themselves or enchant the Professor’s bottle of sherry so that it remains full and causes inspiration, but never inebriation. And, of course, at the heart of the story is his falling in love with Julia, whom he identifies as one of the rare people who can “make a heaven on earth.” I’m curious to read the novel that it’s based on, which apparently develops this relationship more than the film does. While Dudley’s time with Julia does answer Henry’s prayer for Julia’s happiness, he ultimately must leave because of his growing romantic attraction to Julia. It’s impossible for angels to be in love with humans in this world.
An angel falling in love with a human is at the center of one of my other favorite movies to watch during the holidays (and the rest of the year), Wings of Desire. This 1987 Wim Wenders film is not really a Christmas movie–however, the feeling of hopefulness that it inspires in me makes it one that I enjoy watching around the holidays, especially toward the turn of the new year. In this film, Bruno Ganz’s character Damiel, an angel, falls in love with Solveig Dommartin, a human trapeze artist. The black-and-white artiness of Wings of Desire is just gorgeous. In Wenders’s world–like that of The Bishop’s Wife–angels are all around us, unnoticed or unseen, providing help and comfort. However, in Wings of Desire, when an angel falls in love with a mortal, he has the option to give up his immortality and become human, in order to experience the physical reality of the human realm–a realm which includes romantic love.
One of the many reasons I love this movie is its vision of two major places where ineffable beings tend to congregate in the human realm: live music concerts and the library. In the scene where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play a show, humans and angels mingle in the audience, reflecting my own experience of the spiritual dimensions of experiencing music played live. And I also love the vision of libraries as a place where angels linger, as that’s where history lives and is kept alive.
I wrote about my love of these two movies along with my love of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America years ago, in a LiveJournal post that’s apparently lost to the ether. I was curious to explore what it is about these three texts about angels that continue to draw and enchant me, while most pop culture about angels annoys me. In Wings of Desire and Angels in America, angels are tied to history, which is an intriguing idea.
And in all of these, ineffable does not mean infallible, but the ineffable does permeate the human. I find that both comforting and inspiring. I’ve always appreciated the King James language of “entertaining angels unaware” and the similar language in the famous sign that hangs in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris at the top of this post. I like to think of Wenders-esque angels lingering there and in other bookstores, as in the library in the movie. Perhaps this is what draws me to these portrayals of angels, that they are everywhere, offering the potential for enchantment and comfort–just as music and books and film offer, too. Like the song that I named this post after–let’s spend some time during this festive season enjoying such enchantment.
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How do you feel about City of Angels, the Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan remake of Wings of Desire?