Over the years, it's become something of a tradition in our household to take in a movie on the holidays where feasting (sometimes frankly, gorging) take place: Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving.
On some holidays, we go to a local theater, as we did on the Christmas-before-last in order to see the depressing and forgettable, Cold Mountain.
Other times, we just pop a film into the DVD player. For some reason, yesterday our daughter wanted to watch Quiz Show, a DVD of which our son owns. Both he and my wife had seen it; our daughter and I hadn't.
Our son loves Quiz Show and while I don't always agree with his reviews of films (the appeal of The Gladiator, a film he loves, eludes me, for example), his preferences are often close to mine. So, we all decided to watch Quiz Show.
The Robert Redford-directed story of the 1958 scandal surrounding the quiz show, Twenty-One, really is a fabulous film.
Mark Van Doren, scion of a respected academic family and a brilliant man, wowed NBC television audiences in the late-50s with his knowledge of an array of subjects.
Through the investigative efforts of Richard Goodwin (played by Rob Morrow), then working for a Congressional investigating committee, it was learned that producers of Twenty-One fed the answers to certain contestants, including Van Doren.
The movie tells the story of how two men--Van Doren and Goodwin--fought to maintain their integrity, the former losing and then regaining it, the latter nearly losing it and keeping it.
Van Doren, earning $84.00 per week at the outset of the film's story, is bought off for an initial purse of $25,000.00 (ultimately, $122,000.00), a contract with NBC to provide erudite conversation on The Today Show, and dizzying celebrity.
Goodwin felt a kinship with Van Doren. They both had Ivy League backgrounds and they both loved learning. Goodwin struggled to expose the crookedness not just of one 50s game show itself, but of the network itself. In the end, he refused to allow himself to be charmed by Van Doren, who confessed all before a congressional committee.
But, Van Doren and at least initially, the producers, of Twenty-One took the rap. The higher-ups at NBC got off the hook, an element of this true story left dangling in the moral ambiguity with which life is sometimes conducted.
Integrity, of course, means wholeness. It's about being the same person in private that you seem to be in public.
To lack integrity is to be fragmented, never certain what mask to wear and when. When we allow our integrity to slide, we eventually risk losing track of our true selves, a reality that Ralph Fiennes, in his memorable performance as Mark Van Doren, conveys well.
This same sort of crumbling of one's personality and integrity is clearly seen in the demon-possessed man encountered by Jesus in the New Testament. That man, it's said, was so overtaken by the fragmentation of his personality visited on him by evil that he was "beside himself."
Van Doren slid into such a state of being. In a memorable scene, Fiennes' Van Doren is pitted in what seems a friendly contest of wits with his venerable father (played wonderfully by Paul Scofield). Yet, visible to the audience and to Goodwin, present for the dinner at which this happens, is a man who, on the one hand, is fragmenting from guilt, pride, the lust for money, and the love of fame and on the other, loves and respects the father who has been the very model of unconditional love and moral uprightness for him his entire life.
Of course, no one is perfect. We don't always "practice what we preach." Nor are we always the persons others think that we are or, that we want to be.
But what I have learned is that in those times when the evil that lures me threatens to tear me to pieces, there is someone willing and able to pull me back together again. It's the same someone who cast the demons from that man who was beside himself, Jesus the Christ, available to all who simply dare to call out to Him. (One of my favorite passages in the Bible is one quoted by Saint Peter in the very first Christian sermon on the first Christian Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead: "All who call upon the Lord shall be saved!")
Often, our calling on the Lord will only happen when somebody else "calls us to the carpet." The fragmentation of our personalities and the disintegration of the values which we know, in our heart of hearts, are right, can be so pervasive that only the shouting of someone who cares about us--or the subpeona of a Congressional committee--gets our attention.
Personally, I've never been able to maintain my integrity without Christ. And even with Him close at hand, I sometimes have tuned Him out. That's why I'm thankful He never gives up on me, never quits trying to tell me, "I'm willing to meet you where you are and then help you become all that you were meant to be."
I highly recommend Quiz Show if, like me, you haven't seen it yet. More than that, I highly recommend life with Jesus!
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