Doubt REVIEW
Doubt is a play/film that examines the process by which people form convictions, hold them, and defend them. It also looks at the process by which people defend themselves against convictions, surrender them, and live in doubt. At the center of the story is a Catholic priest, a mother superior, a young nun/teacher in the school and a child who may or may not be being molested. I suspect that no two people will see the same movie when they see it. Who the hero is and who the villain is might be completely interchangeable.
DONALD: Morning, Father Flynn.
Flynn grabs William London’s wrist playfully. William is spunky.
FLYNN: You wash those hands today, Mister
London?
William snatches his hand away.
WILLIAM: I washed ‘em, Father.
FLYNN:I don’t know. They’re a different color than your neck.
Kids laugh at the remark, embarrassing William. Flynn has walked on to greet someone out of view.
EXT. THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE - MORNING
Sister Aloysius is looking through the window, down on the student populace. Her eyes narrow.
At the end of the play, we will discover that all of Sister Aloysius’ suspicions of Father Flynn come out of that one moment when she sees this exchange (mind you, she did not hear it). From that moment on, she is hunting for confirmation of what she “knows.” If her window had been open, she would have heard the exchange and everything following would have been different I suppose. This is ironic because throughout the play, she is closing windows.
“Who keeps opening my window?!” she complains at one point.
It is a poignant metaphor. She is a woman who wishes to keep the window shut against secular music in the Christmas pageant, against students having radios, against all change. She is an enforcer of the old regime. She is not interested in challenging her convictions by entertaining doubts – not in faith or in morals. Even her bonnet is worn more closed and narrow than those of her fellow nuns.
FLYNN: Then what is it? What? What did you hear, what did you see that convinced you so thoroughly?
SISTER ALOYSIUS: What does it matter?
FLYNN: It matters! What does it matter? I want to know.
SISTER ALOYSIUS: Out this window I saw you grab William London’s wrist...and I saw him pull away.
Seeing the world with eyes of suspicion, she latches onto an explanation that jives with her understanding of men and of the world and will not let it go – does not want to let it go – she does not even want to ask important questions for fear that her intuitive understanding of what is going on will be interfered with. “But I have my certainty” she says.
His words to her: “Sister, remember there are things beyond your knowledge. Even if you feel certainty, it is an emotion, not a fact.”
As Sir Francis Bacon put it four hundred years ago,
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate. The understanding must not however be allowed to jump and fly from particulars to remote axioms . . . The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.”
Question for Comment: We all make assumptions based on intuitions sometimes. We have all probably hurt others by making assumptions and we have all probably been hurt. How do you suspect the balance sheet looks in your own personal life. Have you been the originator or the recipient of more false assumptions in your life?
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